W. H. Auden, The Art of Poetry No.

17
Interviewed by Michael Newman ISSUE 57, SPRING 1974
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AUDEN
Whats that again?
INTERVIEWER
I wondered which living writer you would say has served as the prime
protector of the integrity of our English tongue . . . ?
AUDEN
Why, me, of course!
Conversation, Autumn 1972

He was sitting beneath two direct white lights of a plywood portico, drinking a
large cup of strong breakfast coffee, chain-smoking cigarettes, and doing the
crossword puzzle that appears on the daily book review page of The New York
Timeswhich, as it happened, this day contained, along with his photo, a
review of his most recent volume of poetry.
When he had completed the puzzle, he unfolded the paper, glanced at the
obits, and went to make toast.
Asked if he had read the review, Auden replied: Of course not. Obviously
these things are not meant for me . . .
His singular perspectives, priorities, and tastes were strongly manifest in the
dcor of his New York apartment, which he used in the winter. Its three large,
high-ceilinged main rooms were painted dark gray, pale green, and purple.
On the wall hung drawings of friendsElizabeth Bishop, E. M. Forster, Paul
Valry, Chester Kallmanframed simply in gold. There was also an original
Blake watercolor, The Act of Creation, in the dining room, as well as several
line drawings of male nudes. On the floor of his bedroom, a portrait of
himself, unframed, faced the wall.
The cavernous front living room, piled high with books, was left dark except

during his brief excursions into its many boxes of manuscripts or for
consultations with the Oxford English Dictionary.
Audens kitchen was long and narrow, with many pots and pans hanging on
the wall. He preferred such delicacies as tongue, tripe, brains, and Polish
sausage, ascribing the eating of beefsteak to the lower orders (its madly
non-U!). He drank Smirnoff martinis, red wine, and cognac, shunned pot, and
confessed to having, under a doctors supervision, tried LSD: Nothing much
happened, but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to
communicate with me.
His conversation was droll, intelligent, and courtly, a sort of humanistic global
gossip, disinterested in the machinations of ambition, less interested in
concrete poetry, absolutely exclusive of electronic influence.
As he once put it: I just got back from Canada, where I had a run-in with
McLuhan. I won.

INTERVIEWER
Youve insisted we do this conversation without a tape recorder. Why?
W. H. AUDEN
Because I think if theres anything worth retaining, the reporter ought to be
able to remember it. Truman Capote tells the story of the reporter whose
machine broke down halfway into an interview. Truman waited while the man
tried in vain to fix it and finally asked if he could continue. The reporter said
not to botherhe wasnt used to listening to what his subjects said!
INTERVIEWER
I thought your objection might have been to the instrument itself. You have
written a new poem condemning the camera as an infernal machine.
AUDEN
Yes, it creates sorrow. Normally, when one passes someone on the street who
is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With
a photo theres no human decision; youre not there; you cant turn away;
you simply gape. Its a form of voyeurism. And I think close-ups are rude.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anything that you were particularly afraid of as a child? The dark,
spiders, and so forth.

AUDEN
No, I wasnt very scared. Spiders, certainlybut thats different, a personal
phobia which persists through life. Spiders and octopi. I was certainly never
afraid of the dark.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a talkative child? I remember your describing somewhere the
autistic quality of your private world.
AUDEN
Yes, I was talkative. Of course there were things in my private world that I
couldnt share with others. But I always had a few good friends.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start writing poetry?
AUDEN
I think my own case may be rather odd. I was going to be a mining engineer
or a geologist. Between the ages of six and twelve, I spent many hours of my
time constructing a highly elaborate private world of my own based on, first
of all, a landscape, the limestone moors of the Pennines; and second, an
industrylead mining. Now I found in doing this, I had to make certain rules
for myself. I could choose between two machines necessary to do a job, but
they had to be real ones I could find in catalogues. I could decide between
two ways of draining a mine, but I wasnt allowed to use magical means.
Then there came a day which later on, looking back, seems very important. I
was planning my idea of the concentrating millyou know, the platonic idea
of what it should be. There were two kinds of machinery for separating the
slime, one I thought more beautiful than the other, but the other one I knew
to be more efficient. I felt myself faced with what I can only call a moral
choiceit was my duty to take the second and more efficient one. Later, I
realized, in constructing this world which was only inhabited by me, I was
already beginning to learn how poetry is written. Then, my final decision,
which seemed to be fairly fortuitous at the time, took place in 1922, in March
when I was walking across a field with a friend of mine from school who later
became a painter. He asked me, Do you ever write poetry? and I said,
NoId never thought of doing so. He said: Why dont you?and at that
point I decided thats what I would do. Looking back, I conceived how the
ground had been prepared.
INTERVIEWER

Do you think of your reading as being an influence in your decision?

AUDEN
Well, up until then the only poetry I had read, as a child, were certain books
of sick jokesBellocs Cautionary Tales, Struwwelpeter by Hoffmann, and
Harry Grahams Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. I had a favorite, which
went like this:
Into the drinking well
The plumber built her
Aunt Maria fell;
We must buy a filter.
Of course I read a good deal about geology and lead mining. Sopwiths A Visit
to Alston Moor was one, Underground Life was another. I cant remember who
wrote it. I read all the books of Beatrix Potter and also Lewis Carroll.
Andersens The Snow Queen I loved, and also Haggards King Solomons
Mines. And I got my start reading detective stories with Sherlock Holmes.
INTERVIEWER
Did you read much of Housman?
AUDEN
Yes, and later I knew him quite well. He told me a very funny story about
Clarence Darrow. It seems that Darrow had written him a very laudatory
letter, claiming to have saved several clients from the chair with quotes from
Housmans poetry. Shortly afterwards, Housman had a chance to meet
Darrow. They had a very nice meeting, and Darrow produced the trial
transcripts he had alluded to. Sure enough, Housman told me, there were
two of my poemsboth misquoted! These are the minor headaches a writer
must live with. My pet peeve is people who send for autographs but omit
putting in stamps.
INTERVIEWER
Did you meet Christopher Isherwood at school?
AUDEN
Yes, Ive known him since I was eight and he was ten, because we were both
in boarding school together at St. Edmunds School, Hindhead, Surrey. Weve
known each other ever since. I always remember the first time I ever heard a
remark which I decided was witty. I was walking with Mr. Isherwood on a

Sunday walkthis was in Surreyand Christopher said, I think God must

have been tired when He made this country. Thats the first time I heard a
remark that I thought was witty.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have good teachers?
AUDEN
Except in mathematics, I had the good luck to have excellent teachers,
especially in science. When I went up for my viva, Julian Huxley showed me a
bone and asked me to tell him what it was. The pelvis of a bird, I said,
which happened to be the right answer. He said: Some people have said it
was the skull of an extinct reptile.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever taught writing?
AUDEN
No, I never have. If I had to teach poetry, which, thank God, I dont, I would
concentrate on prosody, rhetoric, philology, and learning poems by heart. I
may be quite wrong, but I dont see what can be learned except purely
technical thingswhat a sonnet is, something about prosody. If you did have
a poetic academy, the subjects should be quite differentnatural history,
history, theology, all kinds of other things. When Ive been at colleges, Ive
always insisted on giving ordinary academic courseson the eighteenth
century, or Romanticism. True, its wonderful what the colleges have done as
patrons of the artists. But the artists should agree not to have anything to do
with contemporary literature. If they take academic positions, they should do
academic work, and the further they get away from the kind of thing that
directly affects what theyre writing, the better. They should teach the
eighteenth century or something that wont interfere with their work and yet
earn them a living. To teach creative writingI think thats dangerous. The
only possibility I can conceive of is an apprentice system like those they had
in the Renaissancewhere a poet who was very busy got students to finish
his poems for him. Then youd really be teaching, and youd be responsible,
of course, since the results would go out under the poets name.
INTERVIEWER
I noticed that in your early works, there seems to be a fierceness toward
England. Theres a sense of being at war with where you areand that this is
lacking in poems youve written here in the United States, that you seem
more at home.

AUDEN
Yes, quite. Im sure its partly a matter of age. You know, everybody changes.
Its frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older
than he is. One might ask, What should I write at the age of sixty-four, but
never, What should I write in 1940. Its always a problem, I think.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a certain age when a writer is at the height of his powers?
AUDEN
Some poets, like Wordsworth, peter out fairly early. Some, like Yeats, have
done their best work late in life. Nothing is calculable. Aging has its problems,
but they must be accepted without fuss.
INTERVIEWER
What made you choose the U.S. as a home?
AUDEN
Well, the difficulty about England is the cultural lifeit was certainly dim, and
I suspect it still is. In a sense its the same difficulty one faces with some
kinds of family life. I love my family very dearly, but I dont want to live with
them.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see any demarcation between the language you have used since you
came to America, and the language you used in England?
AUDEN
No, not really. Obviously you see little things, particularly when writing prose:
very minor things. There are certain rhymes which could not be accepted in
England. You would rhyme clerk and work here, which you cant in
England. But these are minorsaying twenty of instead of twenty to or
aside from instead of apart from.
INTERVIEWER
How long have you lived here, and where in America were you before taking
this apartment?
AUDEN
Ive been here since 52. I came to America in 39. I lived first in Brooklyn

Heights, then taught for a while in Ann Arbor, then at Swarthmore. I did a
stint in the army, with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. The army didnt like
our report at all because we proved that, in spite of all of our bombing of
Germany, their weapons production didnt go down until after they had lost
the war. Its the same in North Vietnamthe bombing does no good. But you
know how army people are. They dont like to hear things that run contrary to
what theyve thought.
INTERVIEWER
Have you had much contact with men in politics and government?
AUDEN
I have had very little contact with such men. I knew some undergraduates, of
course, while I was at Oxford, who eventually made itHugh Gaitskell,
Crossman, and so forth. I think we should do very well without politicians. Our
leaders should be elected by lot. The people could vote their conscience, and
the computers could take care of the rest.
INTERVIEWER
How about writers as leaders? Yeats, for instance, held office.
AUDEN
And he was terrible! Writers seldom make good leaders. Theyre selfemployed, for one thing, and they have very little contact with their
customers. Its very easy for a writer to be unrealistic. I have not lost my
interest in politics, but I have come to realize that, in cases of social or
political injustice, only two things are effective: political action and straight
journalistic reportage of the facts. The arts can do nothing. The social and
political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare,
Michelangelo, Mozart, et al., had never lived. A poet, qua poet, has only one
political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use
of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted. When words lose their
meaning, physical force takes over. By all means, let a poet, if he wants to,
write what is now called an engag poem, so long as he realizes that it is
mainly himself who will benefit from it. It will enhance his literary reputation
among those who feel the same as he does.
INTERVIEWER
Does this current deterioration and corruption of language, imprecision of
thought, and so forth scare youor is it just a decadent phase?
AUDEN

It terrifies me. I try by my personal example to fight it; as I say, its a poets
role to maintain the sacredness of language.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the present condition of our civilization will be seen by the
future, if there is one, as a prewar decadence?
AUDEN
No, I dont think it has anything to do with the fact of another war. But in the
old days people knew what the words meant, whatever the range of their
vocabulary. Now people hear and repeat a radio and TV vocabulary thirty
percent larger than they know the meaning of. The most outrageous use of
words Ive ever experienced was once when I was a guest on the David
Susskind TV program. During a break he had to do a plug for some sort of
investment firm, and he announced that these people were integrityridden! I could not believe my ears!
INTERVIEWER
You have said bad art is bad in a very contemporary way.
AUDEN
Yes. Of course one can be wrong about what is good or bad. Taste and
judgment can differ. But one has to be loyal to oneself and trust ones own
taste. I can, for instance, enjoy a good tear-jerking movie, where, oh, an old
mother is put away in a homeeven though I know its terrible, the tears will
run down my cheeks. I dont think good work ever makes one cry. Housman
said he got a curious physical sensation with good poetryI never got any. If
one sees King Lear, one doesnt cry. One doesnt have to.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that the story of your patron saint, Wystan, was rather Hamletlike. Are you a Hamlet poet?
AUDEN
No, I couldnt be less. For myself I find that Shakespeares greatest influence
has been his use of a large vocabulary. One thing that makes English so
marvelous for poetry is its great range and the fact that it is an uninflected
language. One can turn verbs into nouns and vice versa, as Shakespeare did.
One cannot do this with inflected languages such as German, French, Italian.
INTERVIEWER

In the early thirties, did you write for an audience that you wanted to jolt into
awareness?
AUDEN
No, I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone
says: Whom do you write for? I reply: Do you read me? If they say, Yes,
I say, Do you like it? If they say, No, then I say, I dont write for you.
INTERVIEWER
Well, then, do you think of a particular audience when writing certain poems?
AUDEN
Well, you know its impossible to tell. If you have someone in mind . . . well,
most of them are probably dead. You wonder whether theyll approve or not,
and then you hopethat somebody will even read you after youre dead
yourself.
INTERVIEWER
You have always been a formalist. Todays poets seem to prefer free verse.
Do you think thats an aversion to discipline?
AUDEN
Unfortunately thats too often the case. But I cant understandstrictly from
a hedonistic point of viewhow one can enjoy writing with no form at all. If
one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun. The wildest
poem has to have a firm basis in common sense, and this, I think, is the
advantage of formal verse. Aside from the obvious corrective advantages,
formal verse frees one from the fetters of ones ego. Here I like to quote
Valry, who said a person is a poet if his imagination is stimulated by the
difficulties inherent in his art and not if his imagination is dulled by them. I
think very few people can manage free verseyou need an infallible ear, like
D. H. Lawrence, to determine where the lines should end.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any poets youve read who have seemed to you to be kindred
spirits? Im thinking of Campion here, with whom you share a great
fascination with metrics.
AUDEN
Yes, I do have several pets, and Campion is certainly among them. Also
George Herbert and William Barnes, and yes, all shared a certain interest in

metrics. These are the poets I should have liked to have had as friends. As
great a poet as Dante might have been, I wouldnt have had the slightest
wish to have known him personally. He was a terrible prima donna.
INTERVIEWER
Can you say something about the genesis of a poem? What comes first?
AUDEN
At any given time, I have two things on my mind: a theme that interests me
and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the
right form; the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together, I
am able to start writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you start your poems at the beginning?
AUDEN
Usually, of course, one starts at the beginning and works through to the end.
Sometimes, though, one starts with a certain line in mind, perhaps a last line.
One starts, I think, with a certain idea of thematic organization, but this
usually alters during the process of writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any aids for inspiration?
AUDEN
I never write when Im drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a highspirited girl who doesnt like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she
doesnt like slavish devotionthen she lies.
INTERVIEWER
And comes up with moon-faced Nonsense, that erudite forger, as you said
in one of your Bucolics.
AUDEN
Quite. Poetry is not self-expression. Each of us, of course, has a unique
perspective which we hope to communicate. We hope that someone reading
it will say, Of course, I knew that all the time but never realized it before.
On the whole I agree here with Chesterton, who said, The artistic
temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.

INTERVIEWER
Many poets are night workers, manic, irregular in their habits.
AUDEN
Sorry, my dear, one mustnt be bohemian!
INTERVIEWER
Why do you disapprove of the recent publication of Eliots Waste Land drafts?
AUDEN
Because theres not a line he left out which makes one wish hed kept it. I
think this sort of thing encourages amateurs to think, Oh, lookI could have
done as well. I think it shameful that people will spend more for a draft than
for a completed poem. Valerie Eliot didnt like having to publish the drafts,
but once they were discovered, she knew they would have to come out
eventuallyso she did it herself to ensure that it was done as well as
possible.
INTERVIEWER
But isnt there some truth to be had from the knowledge that a poet does
quite literally start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart?
AUDEN
It may be necessary for him to start there, but there is no reason for others to
pay it a visit. Here I like the quote of Valry, which says that when people
dont know anything else they take their clothes off.
INTERVIEWER
In your Commonplace Book youve written: Behaviorism worksso does
torture.
AUDEN
It does work. But Im sure if I were given Professor B. F. Skinner and supplied
with the proper drugs and appliances, I could have him in a week reciting the
Athanasian Codein public. The problem with the behavioralists is that they
always manage to exclude themselves from their theories. If all our acts are
conditioned behavior, surely our theories are, too.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see any spirituality in all those hippies out on St. Marks Place? Youve

lived among them for some time now.

AUDEN
I dont know any of them, so how could I tell? What I do like about them is
that they have tried to revive the spirit of carnival, something which has been
conspicuously lacking in our culture. But Im afraid that when they renounce
work entirely, the fun turns ugly.
INTERVIEWER
Your new poem Circe deals with this subject, particularly:
She does not brutalize her victims (beasts could
bite or bolt). She simplifies them to flowers,
sessile fatalists, who dont mind and only
can talk to themselves.
Obviously you know that generation better than you admit.
AUDEN
I must say that I do admire the ones who wont compete in the rat race, who
renounce money and worldy goods. I couldnt do that, Im far too worldy.
INTERVIEWER
Do you own any credit cards?
AUDEN
One. I never use it if I can help it. Ive used it only once, in Israel, to pay a
hotel bill. I was brought up believing that you should not buy anything you
cannot pay cash for. The idea of debt appalls me. I suppose our whole
economy would collapse if everyone had been brought up like me.
INTERVIEWER
Are you a good businessmando you drive a hard bargain, and so forth?
AUDEN
No. Thats not a subject I care to think about.
INTERVIEWER
But you do get what you can for your poetry. I was surprised the other day to

see a poem of yours in Poetrywhich only pays fifty cents a line.

AUDEN
Of course I get what I canwho wouldnt? I think I got my check from them
the other day and used it up before I noticed Id gotten it.
INTERVIEWER
Are you a gourmet?
AUDEN
Im very fond of my food. Im lucky when Im in Austria because my friend Mr.
Kallman is an expert chef, so Im rather spoiled in the summer. Its different
here where I live alone. Sometimes when one is cooking for oneself, one gets
a craze for something. Once I had a craze for turnips. But with solitary eating
one doesnt like to spend much time and simply gobbles it up fast. Certainly I
like good wine, but I dont make a thing of it. Theres a red table wine,
Valpolicella, which I like to drink both when Im in Austria and when Im here.
It travels much better than Chianti, which, when you drink it here, always
tastes like red ink.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever miss a meal while in the process of writing?
AUDEN
No. I live by my watch. I wouldnt know to be hungry if I didnt have my watch
on!
INTERVIEWER
What are the worst lines you knowpreferably by a great poet?
AUDEN
I think they occur in Thomas Hardys The Dynasts, in which Napoleon tries to
escape from Elba. Theres a quatrain which goes like this:
Should the corvette arrive
With the aging Scotch colonel,
Escape would be frustrate,
Retention eternal.
Thats pretty hard to beat!

INTERVIEWER
How about Yeats Had de Valera eaten Parnells heart or Eliots Why should
the aged eagle stretch its wings?
AUDEN
Those arent bad, really, just unintentionally comic. Both would have made
wonderful captions for a Thurber cartoon. As an undergraduate at Oxford I
came up with one: Isobel with her leaping breasts/Pursued me through a
summer . . .
Think what a marvelous cartoon Thurber could have done to that! Whoops!
Whoops! Whoops!
INTERVIEWER
Whats your least favorite Auden poem?
AUDEN
September 1, 1939. And Im afraid its gotten into a lot of anthologies.
INTERVIEWER
Of which poem are you proudest?
AUDEN
It occurs in my commentary on Shakespeares Tempest, a poem written in
prose, a pastiche of the late Henry James Calibans Speech to the
Audience.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever finished a book youve hated?
AUDEN
No, Ive skipped . . . actually I did, once. I read the whole of Mein Kampf
because it was necessary to know what he thought. But it was not a pleasure.
INTERVIEWER
Have you reviewed a book youve hated?
AUDEN
Very rarely. Unless one is a regular reviewer, or one is reviewing a book of
reference where the facts are wrongthen its ones duty to inform the

public, as one would warn them of watered milk. Writing nasty reviews can be
fun, but I dont think the practice is very good for the character.
INTERVIEWER
Whats the nicest poetic compliment youve ever received?
AUDEN
It came in a most unusual way. A friend of mine, Dorothy Day, had been put
in the womens prison at Sixth Avenue and 8th Street for her part in a protest.
Well, once a week at this place, on a Saturday, the girls were marched down
for a shower. A group were being ushered in when one, a whore, loudly
proclaimed: Hundreds have lived without love, But none without water . . .
A line from a poem of mine which had just appeared in The New Yorker. When
I heard this, I knew I hadnt written in vain!
INTERVIEWER
Have you read any books on womens lib?
AUDEN
Im a bit puzzled by it. Certainly they ought to complain about the ad things,
like ladies underwear, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any essential differences between male and female poetry?
AUDEN
Men and women have opposite difficulties to contend with. The difficulty for a
man is to avoid being an aestheteto avoid saying things not because they
are true, but because they are poetically effective. The difficulty for a woman
is in getting sufficient distance from the emotions. No woman is an aesthete.
No woman ever wrote nonsense verse. Men are playboys, women realists. If
you tell a funny storyonly a woman will ever ask: Did it really happen? I
think if men knew what women said to each other about them, the human
race would die out.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think it would be better if women ran the human race?
AUDEN
I think foreign policy should definitely be taken out of mens hands. Men
should continue making machines, but women ought to decide which

machines ought to be made. Women have far better sense. They would never
have introduced the internal combustion engine or any of the evil machines.
Most kitchen machines, for example, are good; they dont obliterate other
skills. Or other people. With our leaders it is all too often a case of ones little
boy saying to another, My father can lick your father. By now, the toys have
gotten far too dangerous.
INTERVIEWER
Have you known any madmen?
AUDEN
Well, of course, Ive known people who went off their heads. We all have.
People who go into the bin and out again. Ive known several people who
were manic-depressives. Ive often thought a lot of good could be done for
them if they would organize a manic-depressives anonymous. They could get
together and do each other some good.
INTERVIEWER
I dont think it would work.
AUDEN
Well, everybody has their ups and downs!
INTERVIEWER
If you were to go mad, what do you think your madness would be?
AUDEN
I couldnt imagine going mad. Its simply something my imagination cannot
take. One can be dottybut thats different! Theres a very funny book called
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, about a hospital in which there are three gents,
all of whom believe themselves to be the Lord. Which is common enough,
except in the case of onewho had actually found a disciple!
INTERVIEWER
What about collaboration? Did you ever go through your poems with T. S.
Eliot?
AUDEN
No, one cant expect other people to do such things. He was very good to me;
he encouraged me. He wasnt jealous of other writers. I had met him just
before I left Oxford. Id sent him some poems, and he asked me to come to

see him. He published the first thing of mine that was publishedit was Paid
on Both Sideswhich came out in The Criterion in 28 or 29.
INTERVIEWER
Was Isherwood helpful at this time?
AUDEN
Oh, enormously. Of course one depends at that age on ones friends; one
reads ones work, and they criticize it. Thats the same in every generation.
INTERVIEWER
Did you collaborate with him at this point, at Oxford?
AUDEN
The first time I collaborated with Isherwood must have been in 33 or 34
The Dog Beneath the Skin. Ive always enjoyed collaborating very much. Its
exciting. Of course, you cant collaborate on a particular poem. You can
collaborate on a translation, or a libretto, or a drama, and I like working that
way, though you can only do it with people whose basic ideas you share
each can then sort of excite the other. When a collaboration works, the two
people concerned become a third person, who is different from either of them
in isolation. I have observed that when critics attempt to say who wrote what
they often get it wrong. Of course, any performed work is bound to be a
collaboration, anyway, because youre going to have performers and
producers and God knows what.
INTERVIEWER
How do you look back now on the early plays you wrote with Isherwood?
AUDEN
None of them will quite do, I think. I have a private weakness for Dogskin,
which I think, if properly done, is fun, except that you have to cut all the
choruses. There is some quite nice poetry in there, but dramatically it wont
do. This was something that was just selfish on my part, wanting to write
some poetry which had nothing to do, really, with drama.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that the state of the theater today is conducive to poetic drama?
AUDEN
The difficulty, I think, is that the tradition of actors and verse has been so

lost. In opera, for example, the whole tradition of singing has never stopped.
The trouble with people who write official poetic dramadrama written in
verseis that they can default so easily either by writing something which is
so nearly prose that it might just as well be proseor something which is not
theatrical. Actually, Mr. Kallman and I had a very interesting experience. Wed
done a translation of The Magic Flute for NBC television, and we decided to
put the spoken interludes into couplets. Nearly everybody in the cast, of
course, were singers . . . who had never spoken verse before; there was only
one part played by a professional actor. With the singers, we could teach
them immediately how to speak verse. The singers, who had never spoken
verse before, could get it in ten minutes because they knew what a beat was.
But we had awful trouble with the professional actor.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that the conventions of acting in the American theater destroy
this ability to speak a line even more?
AUDEN
They wont keep still, of course. Its like a football match. Poetry is very
unnaturalistic. One of the great things about opera singing is that you cannot
pretend its naturalistic.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel an opera libretto is limitingthat it requires sacrifices . . .?
AUDEN
Well, yes. Of course, you have to forget all about what you ordinarily mean by
writing poetry when youre writing poetry to be read or spoken or sung. Its a
completely different art. Naturally, ones subordinate to the composer. And
ones judged, really, by how much one stimulates him. But thats half the fun
of it: being limited. Something you think of, which in cold blood would be
absolute trash, suddenly, when it is sung, becomes interesting. And vice
versa.
INTERVIEWER
Which harks back to Addisons remark about Italian opera in London at the
turn of the eighteenth centurythat whatever is too stupid to say can be
sung.
AUDEN
Well, its not quite trueparticularly these days when composers are much
more dependent on the quality of the libretto than they were. It has been true

ever since Strauss and Hofmannsthal that the librettist isnt a pure flunky.
INTERVIEWER
How did the collaboration of The Rakes Progress proceed?
AUDEN
Mr. Kallman and I prepared the libretto beforehand, though I talked to Mr.
Stravinsky first, and we got some idea of the kind of thing he wanted to do.
What had excited him was an idea that he felt would be an interesting subject
for an opera. It was the last Hogarth scene in Bedlam where there was a
blond man with a sort of broken fiddle. Now, actually Stravinsky never used
this, but intuitively he thought, Now this is an interesting idea. In the end it
wasnt used at all.
INTERVIEWER
Could you characterize your working relationship with Stravinsky?
AUDEN
He was always completely professional. He took what I sent him and set it to
music. He always took enormous trouble to find out what the rhythmic values
were, which must have been difficult for him, since prior to my working with
him he had never set in English.
INTERVIEWER
Did you correspond as did Strauss and Hofmannsthal?
AUDEN
No. The funny thing about their correspondencewhich were very fortunate
to havewas that they chose to work through the mails because they
couldnt stand one another!
INTERVIEWER
Did you and Stravinsky discuss the work over the phone?
AUDEN
No, I dont like the phone very much and never stay on long if I can help it.
You get some people who simply will not get off the line! I remember the
story of the man who answered the phone and was kept prisoner for what
seemed an age. The lady talked and talked. Finally, in desperation, he told
her, Really, I must go. I hear the phone ringing!

INTERVIEWER
What is your Hans Werner Henze opera about?
AUDEN
Its about the early twentieth-century sort of artist-genius who, in order to get
his work done, must exploit other people. A sort of real monster. A poet. It is
set in an Austrian mountain inn in the year 1910. There was an amusing mixup about its title, Elegy for Young Lovers, which appeared on a lawyers
power-of-attorney document as Allergy for Young Lovers.
INTERVIEWER
Did you involve yourself in its production?
AUDEN
Naturally. As much as I was allowed to, which with modern stage directors is
not always easy.
INTERVIEWER
Do you enjoy all the ruckus?
AUDEN
Yes, I do. Im terribly short-tempered.
INTERVIEWER
Does poetry contain music?
AUDEN
One can speak of verbal music so long as one remembers that the sound of
words is inseparable from their meaning. The notes in music do not denote
anything.
INTERVIEWER
What is the difference in your aims when you write a piece of verse which is
to be set to music? Is there a difference in your method?
AUDEN
In writing words to be set to music, one has to remember that, probably, only
one word in three will be heard. So, one must avoid complicated imagery.
Suitable are verbs of motion, interjections, lists, and nouns like moon, sea,
love, death.

INTERVIEWER
You wrote the UN anthem to be set by Casals. What were your aims and
methods there?
AUDEN
The problem in writing the U.N. theme, in which one must not offend
anybodys conception of man, nature, the world, was how to avoid the most
dreary clichs. I decided that the only thing to do was to make all the
imagery musical, for music, unlike language, is international. Casals and I
corresponded, and he was extremely generous about altering his music if, as
once or twice, I felt he had accented syllables wrongly.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you pick up your interest in the Icelandic sagas?
AUDEN
My father brought me up on them. His family originated in an area which
once served as headquarters for the Viking army. The name Auden is
common in the sagas, usually spelled Audun. But we have no family trees or
anything like that. My mother came from Normandywhich means that she
was half Nordic, as the Normans were. I had an ancestor named Birch, who
married Constable. The family, I understand, was furious that she had
married a painter. Ive seen some of his portraits of hershe must have been
quite beautiful. Ive another relative whos married to a Hindu. This goes
along better, I think, with the family line, which says that either one marries
an Englishmanor one marries a Brahmin!
INTERVIEWER
And your father was a doctor?
AUDEN
Yes, he was. But at the time my mother married him, medicine was not
considered one of the respectable professions. One of her aunts told her
shortly before the wedding, Well, marry him if you must, but no one will call
on you!
INTERVIEWER
You believe in class distinctions, then, social forms and formats?
AUDEN
To a degree, yes; one talks to people one has something to say toit keeps

things running a bit more smoothly. And I think the first prerequisite to
civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
INTERVIEWER
Many artists and writers either join the media or use its techniques in
composing or editing their work.
AUDEN
It certainly has never tempted me. I suppose with some people like Norman
Mailer it works out all right. Personally, I dont see how any civilized person
can watch TV, far less own a set. I prefer detective stories, especially Father
Brown. I also dont particularly care for science fiction. I read some Jules
Verne in my youth, but Im not very interested in other planets. I like them
where they are, in the sky.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any media which to you are strictly taboo?
AUDEN
Yes: TV, all movies except the comic onesCharlie Chaplin and the Marx
Brothers were quite funnyand rock and roll all are taboo for me.
INTERVIEWER
Newspapers?
AUDEN
Theyre painful, but one has to read them to know whatever is happening. I
try to get through them as soon as possible. Its never very pleasant in the
morning to open The New York Times.
INTERVIEWER
Have you read, or tried to read, Finnegans Wake?
AUDEN
Im not very good on Joyce. Obviously hes a very great geniusbut his work
is simply too long. Joyce said himself that he wanted people to spend their life
on his work. For me life is too short, and too precious. I feel the same way
about Ulysses. Also, Finnegans Wake cant be read the way one reads
ordinarily. You can dip in, but I dont think anyone could read it straight
through and remember what happened. Its different in small doses. I
remember when Anna Livia Plurabelle came out, published separately, I was

able to get through it and enjoy it. On the whole I like novels to be short, and
funny. There are a few exceptions, of course; one knows with Proust, for
instance, that it couldnt have been any shorter. I suppose my favorite
modern novelists are Ronald Firbank and P. G. Wodehousebecause both
deal with Eden.
INTERVIEWER
Are you aware, by the way, that you are mentioned on page 279 of Finnegans
Wake?
AUDEN
That I know. I could not have given you the page numberbut I have seen
the footnote.
INTERVIEWER
Would you care to comment on Yeats?
AUDEN
I find it very difficult to be fair to Yeats because he had a bad influence on
me. He tempted me into a rhetoric which was, for me, oversimplified.
Needless to say, the fault was mine, not his. He was, of course, a very great
poet. But he and Rilke had a bad effect on me, so its difficult for me to judge
either fairly.
INTERVIEWER
What about Eliots influence?
AUDEN
Eliot can have very little direct stylistic influence on other poets, actually.
What I mean is that it is very rare that one comes across a poem and can say,
Ah, hes been reading Eliot. One can with Yeats or Rilke, but not with Eliot.
Hes a very idiosyncratic poet and not imitable. My work is much easier to
use as a stylistic model. And I dont say this about Eliot in any pejorative
sense at all. Its the same with Gerard Manley Hopkinsboth are extremely
idiosyncratic and cannot readily be adapted to ones own sensibility. When
its attempted, what you end up with is simply Hopkins-and-water.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think Gerontion is Eliots greatest poem?
AUDEN

Again, this idea of choosing. Why should one? Obviously, one wants a lot of
them.
INTERVIEWER
Well, then, do you think Gerontion is a very mystical poem?
AUDEN
Im not sure if mystical is quite the right word. Certainly a part of his work is
based on a rather peculiar vision hes had. Thats part of why hes so
idiosyncratic. Probably something in his early youth. Here I think a comment
he made about Dantes Beatrice is very revealing. Although Dante claimed to
have been nine when he met her, Eliot was sure they must have met at a still
earlier age. I think thats very revealing about Eliot. And all those images of
children swinging from apple trees . . . must refer to some very powerful early
vision. But he wasnt a confessional poet, so we dont know who it was.
INTERVIEWER
Eliot was purportedly influenced in that direction by the poetry of St. John of
the Cross, which we can safely say is mystical. Do you read him much?
AUDEN
His poetry is very remarkable, but not exactly my cup of tea. Essentially
because I dont think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the
ego disappears, so does power over language. I must say that he was
extremely daringhe uses the most daring metaphors for orgasm. This
probably has to do with the fact that in both cases, orgasm and mystical
union, the ego is forgotten.
INTERVIEWER
Do you spend much time on affairs of the Church?
AUDEN
Noapart from going on Sundays.
INTERVIEWER
But you do have a reputation in theological circles; youve had some doings
with the Guild of Episcopal Scholars.
AUDEN
Oh, that just had to do with some advice they wanted on the revision of the
Psalms. Actually, Im passionately anti-liturgical reform, and would have The

Book of Common Prayer kept in Latin. Rite is the link between the dead and
the unborn and needs a timeless language, which in practice means a dead
language. Im curious to know what problems they are having in Israel, where
they speak what was long an unspoken language.
INTERVIEWER
Do you speak Hebrew?
AUDEN
No, I wish I knew it. Obviously its a marvelous language. Something else I
wish we had in my church is the Seder. Ive been to one or two and was
enormously impressed. We dont have anything like that. The Last Supper is a
communal thing, but not a family thing.
INTERVIEWER
What about the rites of marriage?
AUDEN
Well, Im perfectly congenial to the idea of weddings, but what I think ruins so
many marriages, though, is this romantic idea of falling in love. It happens, of
course, I suppose to some people who are possessed of unusually fertile
imaginations. Undoubtedly it is a mystical experience which occurs. But with
most people who think they are in love I think the situation can be described
far more simply, and, Im afraid, brutally. The trouble with all this love
business is one or the other partner ends up feeling bad or guilty because
they dont have it the way theyve read it. Im afraid things went off a lot
more happily when marriages were arranged by parents. I do think it is
absolutely essential that both partners share a sense of humor and an
outlook on life. And, with Goethe, I think marriages should be celebrated
more quietly and humbly, because they are the beginning of something. Loud
celebrations should be saved for successful conclusions.
INTERVIEWER
What is that big book over there?
AUDEN
Its Goethes autobiography. Its amazing. If I were asked to do an
autobiography of my first twenty-six years, I dont think I could fill up sixty
pages. And here Goethe fills up eight hundred! Personally Im interested in
history, but not in the past. Im interested in the present and in the next
twenty-four hours.

INTERVIEWER
Whats the name of your cat?
AUDEN
I havent got any now.
INTERVIEWER
What about Mos?
AUDEN
Mos was a dog.
INTERVIEWER
Who was Rolfi Strobl?
AUDEN
Our housekeepers dog, an Alsatian. There must have been a bitch in the
neighborhood because the poor thing ran out on the autobahn one day and
was run over. We had a very funny experience with Mos one time. We had
gone to Venice for the opening of The Rakes Progress, which was being
broadcast over the radio. Mos was staying with some friends at the time,
who were listening in. The minute my voice came over the airwaves, Moss
ears perked up, and he ran over to the speakerjust like His Masters Voice!
INTERVIEWER
What happened to your cats?
AUDEN
They had to be put away because our housekeeper died. They, too, were
named from opera, Rudimace and Leonora. Cats can be very funny, too, and
have the oddest ways of showing theyre glad to see you. Rudimace always
peed in our shoes.
INTERVIEWER
And then theres your new poem, Talking to Mice. Have you any favorite
mythological mice?
AUDEN
Mythological! What on earth could you be referring to? Are there any, aside
from Mickey Mouse? You must mean fictional mice!

INTERVIEWER
I must.
AUDEN
Oh yes, therere the mice of Beatrix Potter, of which Im quite fond.
INTERVIEWER
How about Mickey?
AUDEN
Hes all right.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe in the Devil?
AUDEN
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
In Austria you live on Audenstrasse. Do your neighbors know who you are?
AUDEN
My neighbors there know Im a poet. The village I live in was the home of a
famous Austrian poet, Josef Weinheber, so theyre used to having a poet
around the place. He committed suicide in 45.
INTERVIEWER
How about your neighbors here?
AUDEN
I dont know. My stock went up last year, I know. There was a feature on me
in the Daily Newswhich everyone here seems to read. After that they
figured I must be somebody. It was very nice to get all that attention.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think writers receive more respect abroad than here?
AUDEN
I wouldnt say so. Ive told people Im a medieval historian when asked what I

do. It freezes conversation. If one tells them ones a poet, one gets these odd
looks which seem to say, Well, whats he living off? In the old days a man
was proud to have in his passport, Occupation: Gentleman. Lord Antrims
passport simply said, Occupation: Peerwhich I felt was correct. Ive had a
lucky life. I had a happy home, and my parents provided me with a good
education. And my father was both a physician and a scholar, so I never got
the idea that art and science were opposing culturesboth were entertained
equally in my home. I cannot complain. Ive never had to do anything I really
disliked. Certainly Ive had to do various jobs I would not have taken on if Id
had the money; but Ive always considered myself a worker, not a laborer. So
many people have jobs they dont like at all. I havent, and Im grateful for
that.

Author photograph by Nancy Crampton

Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71

Interviewed by Linda Kuehl ISSUE 74, FALL-WINTER 1978

JOAN DIDION, CA. 1977. COURTESY OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It is usual for the interviewer to write this paragraph about the circumstances
in which the interview was conducted, but the interviewer in this case, Linda
Kuehl, died not long after the tapes were transcribed. Linda and I talked on
August 18 and August 24, 1977, from about ten in the morning until early
afternoon. Both interviews took place in the living room of my husband's and
my house on the ocean north of Los Angeles, a house we no longer own. The
walls in that room were white. The floors were of terracotta tile, very highly
polished. The glare off the sea was so pronounced in that room that corners
of it seemed, by contrast, extremely dark, and everyone who sat in the room
tended to gravitate toward these dark corners. Over the years the room had
in fact evolved to the point where the only comfortable chairs were in the
dark, away from the windows. I mention this because I remember my fears
about being interviewed, one of which was that I would be construed as the
kind of loon who had maybe 300 degrees of sea view and kept all the chairs
in a kind of sooty nook behind the fireplace. Linda's intelligence dispelled
these fears immediately. Her interest in and acuity about the technical act of
writing made me relaxed and even enthusiastic about talking, which I rarely
am. As a matter of fact, this enthusiasm for talking technically makes me
seem to myself, as I read over the transcript, a kind of apprentice plumber of

fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer's trade, but there we were.

INTERVIEWER
You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you
why.
JOAN DIDION
It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way
you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to
wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell
somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about
someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
INTERVIEWER
Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the
reader listening to you?
DIDION
Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always
writing to myself. So very possibly I'm committing an aggressive and hostile
act toward myself.
INTERVIEWER
So when you ask, as you do in many nonfiction pieces, Do you get the
point? you are really asking if you yourself get the point.
DIDION
Yes. Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to
a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
INTERVIEWER
When did you know you wanted to write?
DIDION
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer.
I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's
make-believe. It's performance. The only difference being that a writer can do
it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of oursan actress

was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly
occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn't plan
what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a
strange way to live.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever have a writing teacher?
DIDION
Mark Schorer was teaching at Berkeley when I was an undergraduate there,
and he helped me. I don't mean he helped me with sentences, or paragraphs
nobody has time for that with student papers; I mean that he gave me a
sense of what writing was about, what it was for.
INTERVIEWER
Did any writer influence you more than others?
DIDION
I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked.
When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the
sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago
when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell
right back into those sentences. I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct
sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.
INTERVIEWER
You've called Henry James an influence.
DIDION
He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated.
Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn't dare to write
one. I'm not even sure I'd dare to read James again. I loved those novels so
much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All
that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if some of your nonfiction pieces aren't shaped as a single Jamesian
sentence.
DIDION
That would be the ideal, wouldn't it. An entire pieceeight, ten, twenty pages

strung on a single sentence. Actually, the sentences in my nonfiction are far

more complicated than the sentences in my fiction. More clauses. More
semicolons. I don't seem to hear that many clauses when I'm writing a novel.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that once you have your first sentence you've got your piece.
That's what Hemingway said. All he needed was his first sentence and he had
his short story.
DIDION
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it.
Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've
laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
INTERVIEWER
The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.
DIDION
Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the
piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That's
how it should be, but it doesn't always work. I think of writing anything at all
as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you're
eliminating possibilities. Unless you're Henry James.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if your ethicwhat you call your harsh Protestant ethicdoesn't
close things up for you, doesn't hinder your struggle to keep all the
possibilities open.
DIDION
I suppose that's part of the dynamic. I start a book and I want to make it
perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've
already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I
hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well,
it's not the ideal, it's not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybeif I
go ahead and finish it anywayI can get it right next time. Maybe I can have
another chance.
INTERVIEWER
Have any women writers been strong influences?
DIDION

I think only in the sense of being models for a life, not for a style. I think that
the Bronts probably encouraged my own delusions of theatricality.
Something about George Eliot attracted me a great deal. I think I was not
temperamentally attuned to either Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf.
INTERVIEWER
What are the disadvantages, if any, of being a woman writer?
DIDION
When I was starting to writein the late fifties, early sixtiesthere was a kind
of social tradition in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad
livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote
novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever
he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role.
Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids. Carson
McCullers, Jane Bowles. Flannery O'Connor, of course. Novels by women
tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive. I'm not sure
this is so true anymore, but it certainly was at the time, and I didn't much like
it. I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own
garden, didn't pay much attention, behavedI supposedeviously. I mean I
didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.
INTERVIEWER
Advantages?
DIDION
The advantages would probably be precisely the same as the disadvantages.
A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.
INTERVIEWER
Can you tell simply from the style of writing, or the sensibility, if the author is
a woman?
DIDION
Well, if style is characterand I believe it isthen obviously your sexual
identity is going to show up in your style. I don't want to differentiate
between style and sensibility, by the way. Again, your style is your sensibility.
But this whole question of sexual identity is very tricky. If I were to read, cold,
something by Anas Nin, I would probably say that it was written by a man
trying to write as a woman. I feel the same way about Colette, and yet both
those women are generally regarded as intensely feminine writers. I don't
seem to recognize feminine. On the other hand, Victory seems to me a

profoundly female novel. So does Nostromo, so does The Secret Agent.

INTERVIEWER
Do you find it easy to write in depth about the opposite sex?
DIDION
Run River was partly from a man's point of view. Everett McClellan. I don't
remember those parts as being any harder than the other parts. A lot of
people thought Everett was shadowy, though. He's the most distinct person
in the book to me. I loved him. I loved Lily and Martha, but I loved Everett
more.
INTERVIEWER
Was Run River your first novel? It seems so finished for a first that I thought
you might have shelved earlier ones.
DIDION
I've put away nonfiction things, but I've never put away a novel. I might throw
out forty pages and write forty new ones, but it's all part of the same novel. I
wrote the first half of Run River at night over a period of years. I was working
at Vogue during the day, and at night I would work on these scenes for a
novel. In no particular sequence. When I finished a scene I would tape the
pages together and pin the long strips of pages on the wall of my apartment.
Maybe I wouldn't touch it for a month or two, then I'd pick a scene off the wall
and rewrite it. When I had about a hundred and fifty pages done I showed
them to twelve publishers, all of whom passed. The thirteenth, Ivan
Obolensky, gave me an advance, and with that thousand dollars or whatever
it was I took a two-month leave of absence and wrote the last half of the
book. That's why the last half is better than the first half. I kept trying to run
the first half through again, but it was intractable. It was set. I'd worked on it
for too many years in too many moods. Not that the last half is perfect. It's
smoother, it moves faster, but there are a great many unresolved problems. I
didn't know how to do anything at all. I had wanted Run River to be very
complicated chronologically, to somehow have the past and present
operating simultaneously, but I wasn't accomplished enough to do that with
any clarity. Everybody who read it said it wasn't working. So I straightened it
out. Present time to flashback to present time. Very straight. I had no option,
because I didn't know how to do it the other way. I just wasn't good enough.
INTERVIEWER
Did you or Jonathan Cape put the comma in the title of the English edition?

DIDION
It comes back to me that Cape put the comma in and Obolensky left the
comma out, but it wasn't of very much interest to me because I hated it both
ways. The working title was In the Night Season, which Obolensky didn't like.
Actually, the working title during the first half was Harvest Home, which
everybody dismissed out of hand as uncommercial, although later there was
a big commercial book by Thomas Tyron called exactly that. Again, I was not
very sure of myself then, or I never would have changed the title.
INTERVIEWER
Was the book autobiographical? I ask this for the obvious reason that first
novels often are.
DIDION
It wasn't except that it took place in Sacramento. A lot of people there
seemed to think that I had somehow maligned them and their families, but it
was just a made-up story. The central incident came from a little one-inch
story in The New York Times about a trial in the Carolinas. Someone was on
trial for killing the foreman on his farm, that's all there was. I think I really put
the novel in Sacramento because I was homesick. I wanted to remember the
weather and the rivers.
INTERVIEWER
The heat on the rivers?
DIDION
The heat. I think that's the way the whole thing began. There's a lot of
landscape that I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. If I
hadn't wanted to remember. The impulse was nostalgia. It's not an
uncommon impulse among writers. I noticed it when I was reading From Here
to Eternity in Honolulu just after James Jones died. I could see exactly that
kind of nostalgia, that yearning for a place, overriding all narrative
considerations. The incredible amount of description. When Prewitt tries to
get from the part of town where he's been wounded out to Alma's house,
every street is named. Every street is described. You could take that passage
and draw a map of Honolulu. None of those descriptions have any narrative
meaning. They're just remembering. Obsessive remembering. I could see the
impulse.
INTERVIEWER
But doesn't the impulse of nostalgia produce the eloquence in Run River?

DIDION
It's got a lot of sloppy stuff. Extraneous stuff. Words that don't work.
Awkwardness. Scenes that should have been brought up, scenes that should
have been played down. But then Play It As It Lays has a lot of sloppy stuff. I
haven't reread Common Prayer, but I'm sure that does, too.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come to terms with point of view in Play It As It Lays? Did you
ever question your authority to do it in both first and third person?
DIDION
I wanted to make it all first person, but I wasn't good enough to maintain at
first. There were tricks I didn't know. So I began playing with a close third
person, just to get something down. By a close third I mean not an
omniscient third but a third very close to the mind of the character. Suddenly
one night I realized that I had some first person and some third person and
that I was going to have to go with both, or just not write a book at all. I was
scared. Actually, I don't mind the way it worked out. The juxtaposition of first
and third turned out to be very useful toward the ending, when I wanted to
accelerate the whole thing. I don't think I'd do it again, but it was a solution to
that particular set of problems. There's a point when you go with what you've
got. Or you don't go.
INTERVIEWER
How long, in all, did Play It As It Lays take to write?
DIDION
I made notes and wrote pages over several years, but the actual physical
writingsitting down at the typewriter and working every day until it was
finishedtook me from January until November 1969. Then of course I had to
run it through againI never know quite what I'm doing when I'm writing a
novel, and the actual line of it doesn't emerge until I'm finishing. Before I ran
it through again I showed it to John and then I sent it to Henry Robbins, who
was my editor then at Farrar, Straus. It was quite rough, with places marked
chapter to come. Henry was unalarmed by my working that way, and he
and John and I sat down one night in New York and talked, for about an hour
before dinner, about what it needed doing. We all knew what it needed. We
all agreed. After that I took a couple of weeks and ran it through. It was just
typing and pulling the line through.
INTERVIEWER

What do you mean exactly by pulling through?

DIDION
For example, I didn't know that BZ was an important character in Play It As It
Lays until the last few weeks I was working on it. So those places I marked
chapter to come were largely places where I was going to go back and pull
BZ through, hit him harder, prepare for the way it finally went.
INTERVIEWER
How did you feel about BZ's suicide at the end?
DIDION
I didn't realize until after I'd written it that it was essentially the same ending
as Run River. The women let the men commit suicide.
INTERVIEWER
I read that Play It As It Lays crystallized for you when you were sitting in the
lobby of the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas and saw a girl walk through.
DIDION
I had thought Maria lived in New York. Maybe she was a model. Anyway, she
was getting a divorce, going through grief. When I saw this actress in the
Riviera Hotel, it occurred to me that Maria could be an actress. In California.
INTERVIEWER
Was she always Maria Wyeth?
DIDION
She didn't even have a name. Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into
something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear
idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love
them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay
with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
INTERVIEWER
Do your characters talk to you?
DIDION
After a while. In a way. When I started Common Prayer, all I knew about
Charlotte was that she was a nervous talker and told pointless stories. A

distracted kind of voice. Then one day I was writing the Christmas party at
the American embassy, and I had Charlotte telling these bizarre anecdotes
with no point while Victor Strasser-Mendana keeps trying to find out who she
is, what she's doing in Boca Grande, who her husband is, what her husband
does. And suddenly Charlotte says, He runs guns. I wish they had caviar.
Well, when I heard Charlotte say this, I had a very clear fix on who she was. I
went back and rewrote some early stuff.
INTERVIEWER
Did you reshuffle a lot and, if so, how? Did you use pins or tape or what?
DIDION
Toward the beginning of a novel I'll write a lot of sections that lead me
nowhere. So I'll abandon them, pin them on a board with the idea of picking
them up later. Quite early in Common Prayer I wrote a part about Charlotte
Douglas going to airports, a couple of pages that I liked but couldn't seem to
find a place for. I kept picking this part up and putting it in different places,
but it kept stopping the narrative; it was wrong everywhere, but I was
determined to use it. Finally I think I put it in the middle of the book.
Sometimes you can get away with things in the middle of a book. The first
hundred pages are very tricky, the first forty pages especially. You have to
make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most
complicated part.
INTERVIEWER
Strategy would seem to be far more complicated in Common Prayer than in
Play It As It Lays because it had so much more plot.
DIDION
Common Prayer had a lot of plot and an awful lot of places and weather. I
wanted a dense texture, and so I kept throwing stuff into it, making promises.
For example, I promised a revolution. Finally, when I got within twenty pages
of the end, I realized I still hadn't delivered this revolution. I had a lot of
threads, and I'd overlooked this one. So then I had to go back and lay in the
preparation for the revolution. Putting in that revolution was like setting in a
sleeve. Do you know what I mean? Do you sew? I mean I had to work that
revolution in on the bias, had to ease out the wrinkles with my fingers.
INTERVIEWER
So the process of writing the novel is for you the process of discovering the
precise novel that you want to write.

DIDION
Exactly. At the beginning I don't have anything at all, don't have any people,
any weather, any story. All I have is a technical sense of what I want to do.
For example, I want sometime to write a very long novel, eight hundred
pages. I want to write an eight-hundred-page novel precisely because I think
a novel should be read at one sitting. If you read a novel over a period of
days or weeks the threads get lost, the suspension breaks. So the problem is
to write an eight-hundred-page novel in which all the filaments are so strong
that nothing breaks or gets forgotten ever. I wonder if Garca Mrquez didn't
do that in The Autumn of the Patriarch. I don't want to read it because I'm
afraid he might have done it, but I did look at it, and it seems to be written in
a single paragraph. One paragraph. The whole novel. I love that idea.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any writing rituals?
DIDION
The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink,
to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because
I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I
spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the
next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening
notes. When I'm really working I don't like to go out or have anybody to
dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don't have the hour, and start the
next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I'm in low spirits.
Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the
same room with it. That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish
things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to
it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start
typing.
INTERVIEWER
What's the main difference between the process of fiction and the process of
nonfiction?
DIDION
The element of discovery takes place, in nonfiction, not during the writing but
during the research. This makes writing a piece very tedious. You already
know what it's about.
INTERVIEWER

Are the subject of pieces determined by editors or are you free to go your
own way?
DIDION
I make them up. They reflect what I want to do at the time, where I want to
be. When I worked for Life I did a great many Honolulu piecesprobably more
than Life might have wantedbecause that's where I wanted to be then. Last
night I finished a piece for Esquire about the California Water Project. I had
always wanted to see the room where they control the water, where they turn
it on and off all over the state, and I also wanted to see my mother and
father. The water and my mother and father were all in Sacramento, so I went
to Sacramento. I like to do pieces because it forces me to make appointments
and see people, but I never wanted to be a journalist or reporter. If I were
doing a story and it turned into a big breaking story, all kinds of teams flying
in from papers and magazines and the networks, I'd probably think of
something else to do.
INTERVIEWER
You've said that when you were an editor at Vogue, Allene Talmey showed
you how verbs worked.
DIDION
Every day I would go into her office with eight lines of copy or a caption or
something. She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very
angry about extra words, about verbs not working. Nobody has time to do
that except on a magazine like Vogue. Nobody, no teacher. I've taught and
I've tried to do it, but I didn't have that much time and neither did the
students. In an eight-line caption everything had to work, every word, every
comma. It would end up being a Vogue caption, but on its own terms it had to
work perfectly.
INTERVIEWER
You say you treasure privacy, that being left alone and leaving others alone
is regarded by members of my family as the highest form of human
endeavor. How does this mesh with writing personal essays, particularly the
first column you did for Life where you felt it imperative to inform the reader
that you were at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in lieu of getting a divorce?
DIDION
I don't know. I could say that I was writing to myself, and of course I was, but
it's a little more complicated than that. I mean the fact that eleven million
people were going to see that page didn't exactly escape my attention.

There's a lot of mystery to me about writing and performing and showing off
in general. I know a singer who throws up every time she has to go onstage.
But she still goes on.
INTERVIEWER
How did the fragility of Joan Didion myth start?
DIDION
Because I'm small, I suppose, and because I don't talk a great deal to people I
don't know. Most of my sentences drift off, don't end. It's a habit I've fallen
into. I don't deal well with people. I would think that this appearance of not
being very much in touch was probably one of the reasons I started writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think some reviewers and readers have mistaken you for your
characters?
DIDION
There was a certain tendency to read Play It As It Lays as an autobiographical
novel, I suppose because I lived out here and looked skinny in photographs
and nobody knew anything else about me. Actually, the only thing Maria and I
have in common is an occasional inflection, which I picked up from hernot
vice versawhen I was writing the book. I like Maria a lot. Maria was very
strong, very tough.
INTERVIEWER
That's where I have difficulty with what so many critics have said about your
women. Your women hardly seem fragile to me.
DIDION
Did you read Diane Johnson's review of Common Prayer in The New York
Review of Books? She suggested that the women were strong to the point of
being figures in a romance, that they were romantic heroines rather than
actual women in actual situations. I think that's probably true. I think I write
romances.
INTERVIEWER
I'd like to ask you about things that recur in your work. There's the line about
dirty tulips on Park Avenue in a short story and in a piece. Or how about the
large, square emerald ring that Lily wears in Run River and Charlotte wears in
Common Prayer?

DIDION
Does Lily wear one, too? Maybe she does. I've always wanted one, but I'd
never buy one. For one thing emeraldswhen you look at them closelyare
always disappointing. The green is never blue enough. Ideally, if the green
were blue enough you could look into an emerald for the rest of your life.
Sometimes I think about Katherine Anne Porter's emeralds, sometimes I
wonder if they're blue enough. I hadn't planned that emerald in Common
Prayer to recur the way it does. It was just something I thought Charlotte
might have, but as I went along the emerald got very useful. I kept taking
that emerald one step further. By the end of the novel the emerald is almost
the narrative. I had a good time with that emerald.
INTERVIEWER
What about the death of a parent, which seems to recur as a motif?
DIDION
You know how doctors who work with children get the children to tell stories?
And they figure out from the stories what's frightening the child, what's
worrying the child, what the child thinks? Well, a novel is just a story. You
work things out in the stories you tell.
INTERVIEWER
And the abortion or loss of a child?
DIDION
The death of children worries me all the time. It's on my mind. Even I know
that, and I usually don't know what's on my mind. On the whole, I don't want
to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing I
don't do it, I can't do it. The abortion in Play It As It Lays didn't occur to me
until I'd written quite a bit of the book. The book needed an active moment, a
moment at which things changed for Maria, a moment in whichthis was
very, very importantMaria was center stage for a number of pages. Not at a
party reacting to somebody else. Not just thinking about her lot in life, either.
A long section in which she was the main player. The abortion was a narrative
strategy.
INTERVIEWER
Was it a narrative strategy in Run River?
DIDION
Actually, it was the excuse for a digression, into landscape. Lily has an

abortion in San Francisco and then she comes home on the Greyhound bus. I
always think of the Greyhound bus and not the abortion. The bus part is very
detailed about the look of the towns. It's something I wrote in New York; you
can tell I was homesick.
INTERVIEWER
How about the freeways that reappear?
DIDION
Actually, I don't drive on the freeway. I'm afraid to. I freeze at the top
of the entrance, at the instant when you have to let go and join it.
Occasionally I do get on the freewayusually because I'm shamed into it
and it's such an extraordinary experience that it sticks in my mind. So I use it.
INTERVIEWER
And the white space at the corner of Sunset and La Brea in Hollywood? You
mention it in some piece and then in Play It As It Lays.
DIDION
I've never analyzed it, but one line of poetry I always have in mind is the line
from Four Quartets: at the still point of the turning world. I tend to move
toward still points. I think of the equator as a still point. I suppose that's why I
put Boca Grande on the equator.
INTERVIEWER
A narrative strategy.
DIDION
Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very
mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it
would ever believe. When I started Play It As It Lays I gave Maria a child, a
daughter, Kate, who was in kindergarten. I remember writing a passage in
which Kate came home from school and showed Maria a lot of drawings,
orange and blue crayon drawings, and when Maria asked her what they were,
Kate said, Pools on fire. You can see I wasn't having too much success
writing this child. So I put her in a hospital. You never meet her. Now, it turned
out to have a great deal of importanceKate's being in the hospital is a very
large element in Play It As It Laysbut it began because I couldn't write a
child, no other reason. Again, in Common Prayer, Marin bombs the
Transamerica Building because I needed her to. I needed a crisis in
Charlotte's life. Well, at this very moment, right now, I can't think of the
Transamerica Building without thinking of Marin and her pipe bomb and her

gold bracelet, but it was all very arbitrary in the beginning.

INTERVIEWER
What misapprehensions, illusions and so forth have you had to struggle
against in your life? In a commencement address you once said there were
many.
DIDION
All kinds. I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in
terms of things read about it. I began with a literary idea of experience, and I
still don't know where all the lies are. For example, it may not be true that
people who try to fly always burst into flames and fall. That may not be true
at all. In fact people do fly, and land safely. But I don't really believe that. I
still see Icarus. I don't seem to have a set of physical facts at my disposal,
don't seem to understand how things really work. I just have an idea of how
they work, which is always trouble. As Henry James told us.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to live your life on the edge, or, at least, on the literary idea of the
edge.
DIDION
Again, it's a literary idea, and it derives from what engaged me imaginatively
as a child. I can recall disapproving of the golden mean, always thinking there
was more to be learned from the dark journey. The dark journey engaged me
more. I once had in mind a very light novel, all surface, all conversations and
memories and recollections of some people in Honolulu who were getting
along fine, one or two misapprehensions about the past notwithstanding.
Well, I'm working on that book now, but it's not running that way at all. Not at
all.
INTERVIEWER
It always turns into danger and apocalypse.
DIDION
Well, I grew up in a dangerous landscape. I think people are more affected
than they know by landscapes and weather. Sacramento was a very extreme
place. It was very flat, flatter than most people can imagine, and I still favor
flat horizons. The weather in Sacramento was as extreme as the landscape.
There were two rivers, and these rivers would flood in the winter and run dry
in the summer. Winter was cold rain and tulle fog. Summer was 100 degrees,
105 degrees, 110 degrees. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the

world. It so happens that if you're a writer the extremes show up. They don't
if you sell insurance.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Art of Fiction No. 72

Interviewed by Robert Phillips ISSUE 74, FALL-WINTER 1978
undefined
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARION ETTLINGER

Joyce Carol Oates is the rarest of commodities, an author modest about her
work, though there is such a quantity of it that she has three publishersone
for fiction, one for poetry and a small press for more experimental work,
limited editions, and books her other publishers simply cannot schedule. And
despite the added demands of teaching, she continues to devote much
energy to The Ontario Review, a literary quarterly that her husband edits and
for which she serves as a contributing editor.
Ms. Oates is striking-looking and slender, with dark hair and large, inquiring
eyes. She is highly attractive but not photogenic; no photo has ever done
justice to her appearance, which conveys grace and high intelligence. If her
manner is taken for aloofnessas it sometimes has beenit is, in fact, a
shyness that the publication of thirty-three books, the production of three
plays, and the winning of the National Book Award has not displaced.
This interview began at her Windsor home in the summer of 1976 before she
and her husband moved to Princeton. When interviewed, her speaking voice
was, as always, soft and reflective. One receives the impression that she
never speaks in anything but perfectly formed sentences. Ms. Oates
answered all questions openly while curled with her Persian cats upon a sofa.
(She is a confirmed cat lover and recently took in two more kittens at the
Princeton house.)
Talk continued during a stroll by the banks of the Detroit River where she
confessed to having sat for hours, watching the horizon and the boats, and
dreaming her characters into existence. She sets these dreams physically
onto paper on a writing table in her study, which faces the river.
Additional questions were asked in New York during the 1976 Christmas
season, when Ms. Oates and her husband attended a seminar on her work,
which was part of that year's Modern Language Association convention. Many

of the questions in this interview were answered via correspondence. She felt
that only by writing out her replies could she say precisely what she wished
to, without possibility of misunderstanding or misquotation.

INTERVIEWER
We may as well get this one over with first: You're frequently charged with
producing too much.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is
ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we
all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting onesjust as a
young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing
his first significant one. Each book as it is written, however, is a completely
absorbing experience, and feels always as if it were the work I was born to
write. Afterward, of course, as the years pass, it's possible to become more
detached, more critical.
I really don't know what to say. I note and can to some extent sympathize
with the objurgatory tone of certain critics, who feel that I write too much
because, quite wrongly, they believe they ought to have read most of my
books before attempting to criticize a recently published one. (At least I think
that's why they react a bit irritably.) Yet each book is a world unto itself and
must stand alone, and it should not matter whether a book is a writer's first,
or tenth, or fiftieth.
INTERVIEWER
About your criticsdo you read them, usually? Have you ever learned
anything from a book review or an essay on your work?
OATES
Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays
that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms. Of
course, it's a pleasure simply to discover that someone has read and
responded to one's work; being understood, and being praised, is beyond
expectation most of the time . . . The average review is a quickly written
piece not meant to be definitive. So it would be misguided for a writer to read
such reviews attentively. All writers without exception find themselves
clapperclawed from time to time; I think the experience (provided one
survives it) is wonderfully liberating: After the first death there is no other . . .
A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of

necessity, a hide like a rhino's, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful
butterfly of a spirit.
INTERVIEWER
Returning to the matter of your productivity: Have you ever dictated into a
machine?
OATES
No, oddly enough I've written my last several novels in longhand first. I had
an enormous, rather frightening stack of pages and notes for The Assassins,
probably eight hundred pagesor was it closer to a thousand? It alarms me
to remember. Childwold needed to be written in longhand, of course. And now
everything finds its initial expression in longhand and the typewriter has
become a rather alien thinga thing of formality and impersonality. My first
novels were all written on a typewriter: first draft straight through, then
revisions, then final draft. But I can't do that any longer.
The thought of dictating into a machine doesn't appeal to me at all. Henry
James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort
of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of
ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever worryconsidering the vast body of your workif you haven't
written a particular scene before, or had characters say the same lines?
OATES
Evidently, there are writers (John Cheever, Mavis Gallant come immediately
to mind) who never reread their work, and there are others who reread
constantly. I suspect I am somewhere in the middle. If I thought I had written
a scene before, or written the same lines before, I would simply look it up.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of work schedule do you follow?
OATES
I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before
breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break
for many hoursand consequently have breakfast at two or three in the
afternoon on good days. On school days, days that I teach, I usually write for
an hour or forty-five minutes in the morning, before my first class. But I don't
have any formal schedule, and at the moment I am feeling rather

melancholy, or derailed, or simply lost, because I completed a novel some

weeks ago and haven't begun another . . . except in scattered, stray notes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write? Or can you get
to work whatever your state of mind? Is your mood reflected in what you
write? How do you describe that perfect state in which you can write from
early morning into the afternoon?
OATES
One must be pitiless about this matter of mood. In a sense, the writing will
create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental
functiona means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind
then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are
in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing
when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing
card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . .
and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.
Joyce said of the underlying structure of Ulyssesthe Odyssean parallel and
parodythat he really didn't care whether it was plausible so long as it
served as a bridge to get his soldiers across. Once they were across, what
does it matter if the bridge collapses? One might say the same thing about
the use of one's self as a means for the writing to get written. Once the
soldiers are across the stream . . .
INTERVIEWER
What does happen when you finish a novel? Is the next project one that has
been waiting in line? Or is the choice more spontaneous?
OATES
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and
eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the
earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in
a desk drawer. Sometimes I work on two novels simultaneously, though one
usually forces the other into the background. The rhythm of writing, revising,
writing, revising, et cetera, seems to suit me. I am inclined to think that as I
grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may
come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all. My next novel, Unholy
Loves, was written around the time of Childwold, for instance, and revised
after the completion of that novel, and again revised this past spring and
summer. My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I
am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or

certainly should be, an art in itself.

INTERVIEWER
Do you keep a diary?
OATES
I began keeping a formal journal several years ago. It resembles a sort of
ongoing letter to myself, mainly about literary matters. What interests me in
the process of my own experience is the wide range of my feelings. For
instance, after I finish a novel I tend to think of the experience of having
written it as being largely pleasant and challenging. But in fact (for I keep
careful records) the experience is various: I do suffer temporary bouts of
frustration and inertia and depression. There are pages in recent novels that
I've rewritten as many as seventeen times, and a story, The Widows, which
I revised both before and after publication in The Hudson Review, and then
revised slightly again before I included it in my next collection of storiesa
fastidiousness that could go on into infinity.
Afterward, however, I simply forget. My feelings crystallize (or are
mythologized) into something much less complex. All of us who keep journals
do so for different reasons, I suppose, but we must have in common a
fascination with the surprising patterns that emerge over the yearsa sort of
arabesque in which certain elements appear and reappear, like the designs in
a well-wrought novel. The voice of my journal is very much like the one I find
myself using in these replies to you: the voice in which I think or meditate
when I'm not writing fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Besides writing and teaching, what daily special activities are important to
you? Travel, jogging, music? I hear you're an excellent pianist?
OATES
We travel a great deal, usually by car. We've driven slowly across the
continent several times, and we've explored the South and New England and
of course New York State with loving thoroughness. As a pianist I've defined
myself as an enthusiastic amateur, which is about the most merciful thing
that can be said. I like to draw, I like to listen to music, and I spend an
inordinate amount of time doing nothing. I don't even think it can be called
daydreaming.
I also enjoy that much-maligned occupation of housewifery, but hardly dare
say so, things being what they are today. I like to cook, to tend plants, to
garden (minimally), to do simple domestic things, to stroll around shopping

malls and observe the qualities of people, overhearing snatches of

conversations, noting people's appearances, their clothes, and so forth.
Walking and driving a car are part of my life as a writer, really. I can't imagine
myself apart from these activities.
INTERVIEWER
Despite critical and financial success, you continue to teach. Why?
OATES
I teach a full load at the University of Windsor, which means three courses.
One is creative writing, one is the graduate seminar (in the Modern Period),
the third is an oversized (115 students) undergraduate course that is lively
and stimulating but really too swollen to be satisfying to me. There is,
generally, a closeness between students and faculty at Windsor that is very
rewarding, however. Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really
experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent
and responsive class. At the present time I'm going through Joyce's work with
nine graduate students and each seminar meeting is very exciting (and
draining) and I can't think, frankly, of anything else I would rather do.
INTERVIEWER
It is a sometimes publicized fact that your professor-husband does not read
most of your work. Is there any practical reason for this?
OATES
Ray has such a busy life of his own, preparing classes, editing The Ontario
Review and so forth, that he really hasn't time to read my work. I do,
occasionally, show him reviews, and he makes brief comments on them. I
would have liked, I think, to have established an easygoing relationship with
some other writers, but somehow that never came about. Two or three of us
at Windsor do read one another's poems, but criticism as such is minimal. I've
never been able to respond very fully to criticism, frankly, because I've
usually been absorbed in another work by the time the criticism is available
to me. Also, critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works
other than those I remember writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel in any way an expatriate or an exile, living in Canada?
OATES
We are certainly exiles of a sort. But we would be, I think, exiles if we lived in
Detroit as well. Fortunately, Windsor is really an international, cosmopolitan

community, and our Canadian colleagues are not intensely and narrowly
nationalistic.
But I wonderdoesn't everyone feel rather exiled? When I return home to
Millerport, New York, and visit nearby Lockport, the extraordinary changes
that have taken place make me feel like a stranger; the mere passage of time
makes us all exiles. The situation is a comic one, perhaps, since it affirms the
power of the evolving community over the individual, but I think we tend to
feel it as tragic. Windsor is a relatively stable community, and my husband
and I have come to feel, oddly, more at home here than we probably would
anywhere else.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever consciously changed your lifestyle to help your work as a
writer?
OATES
Not really. My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous, and deeply
introverted, so life wherever I attempt it turns out to be claustral. Live like a
bourgeois, Flaubert suggested, but I was living like that long before I came
across Flaubert's remark.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote Do with Me What You Will during your year living in London. While
there you met many writers such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Colin
Wilson, Iris Murdochwriters you respect, as your reviews of their work
indicate. Would you make any observations on the role of the writer in society
in England versus that which you experience here?
OATES
The English novelist is almost without exception an observer of society. (I
suppose I mean society in its most immediate, limited sense.) Apart from
writers like Lawrence (who doesn't seem altogether English, in fact) there
hasn't been an intense interest in subjectivity, in the psychology of living,
breathing human beings. Of course, there have been marvelous novels. And
there is Doris Lessing, who writes books that can no longer be categorized:
fictional parable, autobiography, allegory . . . ? And John Fowles. And Iris
Murdoch.
But there is a feel to the American novel that is radically different. We are
willing to risk being called formless by people whose ideas of form are
rigidly limited, and we are wilder, more exploratory, more ambitious, perhaps
less easily shamed, less easily discouraged. The intellectual life, as such, we

tend to keep out of our novels, fearing the sort of highly readable but
ultimately disappointing cerebral quality of Huxley's work . . . or, on a
somewhat lower level, C. P. Snow's.
INTERVIEWER
The English edition of Wonderland has a different ending from the American.
Why? Do you often rewrite published work?
OATES
I was forced to rewrite the ending of that particular novel because it struck
me that the first ending was not the correct one. I have not rewritten any
other published work (except, of course, for short stories, which sometimes
get rewritten before inclusion in a book) and don't intend to if I can possibly
help it.
INTERVIEWER
You've written novels on highly specialized fields, such as brain surgery. How
do you research such backgrounds?
OATES
A great deal of reading, mainly. Some years ago I developed a few odd
symptoms that necessitated my seeing a doctor, and since there was for a
time talk of my being sent to a neurologist, I nervously and superstitiously
began reading the relevant journals. What I came upon so chilled me that I
must have gotten well as a result . . .
INTERVIEWER
In addition to the novel about medicine, you've written one each on law,
politics, religion, spectator sports: Are you consciously filling out a program
of novels about American life?
OATES
Not really consciously. The great concern with medicine really grew out of
an experience of some duration that brought me into contact with certain
thoughts of mortality: of hospitals, illnesses, doctors, the world of death and
dying and our human defenses against such phenomena. (A member of my
family to whom I was very close died rather slowly of cancer.) I attempted to
deal with my own very inchoate feelings about these matters by dramatizing
what I saw to be contemporary responses to mortality. My effort to wed
myself with a fictional character and our synthesis in turn with a larger,
almost allegorical condition resulted in a novel that was difficult to write and
also, I suspect, difficult to read.

A concern with law seemed to spring naturally out of the thinking many of us
were doing in the sixties: What is the relationship between law and
civilization, what hope has civilization without law, and yet what hope has
civilization with law as it has developed in our tradition? More personal
matters blended with the larger issues of crime and guilt, so that I felt I
was able to transcend a purely private and purely local drama that might
have had emotional significance for me, but very little beyond that; quite by
accident I found myself writing about a woman conditioned to be unnaturally
passive in a world of hearty masculine combatan issue that became
topical even as the novel Do with Me What You Will was published, and is
topical still, to some extent.
The political novel, The Assassins, grew out of two experiences I had some
years ago, at high-level conferences involving politicians, academic
specialists, lawyers, and a scatteringno, hardly thatof literary people. (I
won't be more specific at the moment.) A certain vertiginous fascination with
work which I noted in my own nature I was able to objectify (and, I think,
exaggerate) in terms of the various characters' fanaticism involving their own
workmost obviously in Andrew Petrie's obsession with transforming the
consciousness of America. The Assassins is about megalomania and its
inevitable consequences, and it seemed necessary that the assassins be
involved in politics, given the peculiar conditions of our era.
The new religious novel, Son of the Morning, is rather painfully
autobiographical, in part; but only in part. The religion it explores is not
institutional but rather subjective, intensely personal, so as a novel it is
perhaps not like the earlier three I have mentioned, or the racing novel, With
Shuddering Fall. Rather, Son of the Morning is a novel that begins with wide
ambitions and ends very, very humbly.
INTERVIEWER
Somewhere in print you called The Assassins the favorite of your novels. It
received very mixed reviews. I've often thought that book was misread. For
instance, I think the martyr in that novel arranged for his own
assassination, true? And that his wife was never really attacked outside the
country house; she never left it. Her maiming was all confined within her
head.
OATES
What a fine surprise! You read the scene exactly as it was meant to be read.
Even well-intentioned reviewers missed the point; so far as I know, only two
or three people read Yvonne's scene as I had intended it to be read. Yet the
hallucinatory nature of the dismemberment scene is explicit. And Andrew
Petrie did, of course, arrange for his own assassination, as the novel makes

clear in its concluding pages.

The novel has been misread, of course, partly because it's rather long and I
think reviewers, who are usually pressed for time, simply treated it in a
perfunctory way. I'm not certain that it is my favorite novel. But it is, or was,
my most ambitious. It involved a great deal of effort, the collating of
passages (and memories) that differ from or contradict one another. One
becomes attached to such perverse, maddening ugly ducklings, but I can't
really blame reviewers for being impatient with the novel. As my novels grow
in complexity they please me more and please the literary world hardly at
alla sad situation, but not a paralyzing one.
INTERVIEWER
It's not merely a matter of complexity. One feels that your fiction has become
more and more urgent, more subjective and less concerned with the outward
details of this worldespecially in Childwold. Was that novel a deliberate
attempt to write a poetic novel? Or is it a long poem?
OATES
I don't see that Childwold is not concerned with the outward details of the
world. In fact, it's made up almost entirely of visual detailsof the natural
world, of the farm the Bartletts own, and of the small city they gravitate to.
But you are right, certainly, in suggesting that it is a poetic novel. I had
wanted to create a prose poem in the form of a novel, or a novel in the form
of a prose poem: The exciting thing for me was to deal with the tension that
arose between the image-centered structure of poetry and the narrativecentered and linear structure of the interplay of persons that constitutes a
novel. In other words, poetry focuses upon the image, the particular thing, or
emotion, or feeling, while prose fiction focuses upon motion through time and
space. The one impulse is toward stasis, the other toward movement.
Between the two impulses there arose a certain tension that made the writing
of the novel quite challenging. I suppose it is an experimental work, but I shy
away from thinking of my work in those terms: It seems to me there is a
certain self-consciousness about anyone who sets himself up as an
experimental writer. All writing is experimental.
But experimentation for its own sake doesn't much interest me; it seems to
belong to the early sixties, when Dadaism was being rediscovered. In a sense
we are all post-Wake writers and it's Joyce, and only Joyce, who casts a long
terrifying shadow . . . The problem is that virtuoso writing appeals to the
intellect and tends to leave one's emotions untouched. When I read aloud to
my students the last few pages of Finnegans Wake, and come to that
glorious, and heartbreaking, final section (But you're changing, acoolsha,
you're changing from me, I can feel), I think I'm able to communicate the

almost overwhelmingly beautiful emotion behind it, and the experience

certainly leaves me shaken, but it would be foolish to think that the average
reader, even the average intelligent reader, would be willing to labor at the
Wake, through those hundreds of dense pages, in order to attain an
emotional and spiritual sense of the work's wholeness, as well as its genius.
Joyce's Ulysses appeals to me more: That graceful synthesis of the
naturalistic and the symbolic suits my temperament . . . I try to write
books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader, and in quite
another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic
elements. And yet, it's the same bookor nearly. A trompe l'oeil, a work of
as if.
INTERVIEWER
Very little has been made of the humor in your work, the parody. Some of
your books, like Expensive People, The Hungry Ghosts, and parts of
Wonderland, seem almost Pinteresque in their absurd humor. Is Pinter an
influence? Do you consider yourself a comedic writer?
OATES
There's been humor of a sort in my writing from the first; but it's understated,
or deadpan. Pinter has never struck me as very funny. Doesn't he really write
tragedy?
I liked Ionesco at one time. And Kafka. And Dickens (from whom Kafka
learned certain effects, though he uses them, of course, for different ends). I
respond to English satire, as I mentioned earlier. Absurdist or dark or
black or whatever: What isn't tragic belongs to the comic spirit. The novel is
nourished by both and swallows both up greedily.
INTERVIEWER
What have you learned from Kafka?
OATES
To make a jest of the horror. To take myself less seriously.
INTERVIEWER
John Updike has been accused of a lack of violence in his work. You're often
accused of portraying too much. What is the function of violence in your
work?
OATES
Given the number of pages I have written, and the violent incidents

dispersed throughout them, I rather doubt that I am a violent writer in any

meaningful sense of the word. Certainly, the violence is minimal in a novel
like them, which purported to be a naturalistic work set in Detroit in the
sixties; real life is much more chaotic.
INTERVIEWER
Which of your books gave you the greatest trouble to write? And which gave
the greatest pleasure or pride?
OATES
Both Wonderland and The Assassins were difficult to write. Expensive People
was the least difficult. I am personally very fond of Childwold, since it
represents, in a kind of diffracted way, a complete world made of memory
and imagination, a blending together of different times. It always surprises
me that other people find that novel admirable because, to me, it seems very
private . . . the sort of thing a writer can do only once.
Aside from that, Do with Me What You Will gives me a fair amount of pleasure,
and, of course, I am closest to the novel I finished most recently, Son of the
Morning. (In general, I think we are always fondest of the books we've just
completed, aren't we? For obvious reasons.) But then I think of Jules and
Maureen and Loretta of them and I wonder if perhaps that isn't my favorite
novel, after all.
INTERVIEWER
For whom do you writeyourself, your friends, your public? Do you imagine
an ideal reader for your work?
OATES
Well, there are certain stories, like those in The Hungry Ghosts, which I have
written for an academic community and, in some cases, for specific people.
But in general the writing writes itselfI mean a character determines his or
her voice and I must follow along. Had I my own way the first section of The
Assassins would be much abbreviated. But it was impossible to shut Hugh
Petrie up once he got going and, long and painful and unwieldy as his section
is, it's nevertheless been shortened. The problem with creating such highly
conscious and intuitive characters is that they tend to perceive the contours
of the literary landscape in which they dwell and, like Kasch of Childwold, try
to guide or even to take over the direction of the narrative. Hugh did not want
to die, and so his section went on and on, and it isn't an exaggeration to say
that I felt real dismay in dealing with him.
Son of the Morning is a first-person narration by a man who is addressing

himself throughout to God. Hence the whole novel is a prayer. Hence the
ideal reader is, then, God. Everyone else, myself included, is secondary.
INTERVIEWER
Do you consider yourself religious? Do you feel there is a firm religious basis
to your work?
OATES
I wish I knew how to answer this. Having completed a novel that is saturated
with what Jung calls the God-experience, I find that I know less than ever
about myself and my own beliefs. I have beliefs, of course, like everyonebut
I don't always believe in them. Faith comes and goes. God diffracts into a
bewildering plenitude of elementsthe environment, love, friends and family,
career, profession, fate, biochemical harmony or disharmony, whether the
sky is slate-gray or a bright mesmerizing blue. These elements then coalesce
again into something seemingly unified. But it's a human predilection, isn't it?
our tendency to see, and to wish to see, what we've projected outward
upon the universe from our own souls? I hope to continue to write about
religious experience, but at the moment I feel quite drained, quite depleted.
And as baffled as ever.
INTERVIEWER
You mention Jung. Is Freud also an influence? Laing?
OATES
Freud I have always found rather limited and biased; Jung and Laing I've read
only in recent years. As an undergraduate at Syracuse University I discovered
Nietzsche, and it may be the Nietzschean influence (which is certainly far
more provocative than Freud's) that characterizes some of my work. I don't
really know, consciously. For me, stories usually beginor began, since I write
so few of them nowout of some magical association between characters
and their settings. There are some stories (I won't say which ones) that
evolved almost entirely out of their settings, usually rural.
INTERVIEWER
Your earliest stories and novels seem influenced by Faulkner and by Flannery
O'Connor. Are these influences you acknowledge? Are there others?
OATES
I've been reading for so many years, and my influences must be so vastit
would be very difficult to answer. An influence I rarely mention is Thoreau,
whom I read at a very impressionable age (my early teens), and Henry James,

O'Connor and Faulkner certainly, Katherine Anne Porter, and Dostoyevsky. An

odd mixture.
INTERVIEWER
The title Wonderland, and frequent other allusions in your work, point toward
a knowledge of, if not an affinity for, Lewis Carroll. What is the connection,
and is it an important one?
OATES
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were my
very first books. Carroll's wonderful blend of illogic and humor and horror and
justice has always appealed to me, and I had a marvelous time teaching the
books last year in my undergraduate course.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anything you were particularly afraid of as a child?
OATES
Like most children, I was probably afraid of a variety of things. The unknown?
The possibility of those queer fortuitous metamorphoses that seem to
overtake certain of Carroll's characters? Physical pain? Getting lost? . . . My
proclivity for the irreverent and the nonsensical was either inspired by Carroll
or confirmed by him. I was always, and continue to be, an essentially
mischievous child. This is one of my best-kept secrets.
INTERVIEWER
You began writing at a very early age. Was it encouraged by your family? Was
yours a family of artistic ambitions?
OATES
In later years my parents have become artistic, but when they were
younger, and their children were younger, they had no time for anything
much except work. I was always encouraged by my parents, my
grandmother, and my teachers to be creative. I can't remember when I first
began to tell storiesby drawing, it was thenbut I must have been very
young. It was an instinct I followed quite naturally.
INTERVIEWER
Much of your work is set in the 1930s, a period during which you were merely
an infant at best. Why is that decade so important to your work or vision?
OATES

Since I was born in 1938, the decade is of great significance to me. This was
the world of my parents, who were young adults at the time, the world I was
born into. The thirties seem in an odd way still living to me, partly in terms
of my parents' and grandparents' memories, and partly in terms of its
treatment in books and films. But the twenties are too remotelost to me
entirely! I simply haven't had the imaginative power to get that far back.
I identify very closely with my parents in ways I can't satisfactorily explain.
The lives they lived before I was born seem somehow accessible to me. Not
directly, of course, but imaginatively. A memory belonging to my mother or
father seems almost to belong to me. In studying old photographs I am
struck sometimes by a sense of my being contemporary with my parentsas
if I'd known them when they were, let's say, only teenagers. Is this odd? I
wonder. I rather suspect others share in their family's experiences and
memories without knowing quite how.
INTERVIEWER
When we were undergraduates together at Syracuse, you already were
something of a legend. It was rumored you'd finish a novel, turn it over, and
immediately begin writing another on the back side. When both sides were
covered, you'd throw it all out, and reach for clean paper. Was it at Syracuse
you first became aware you were going to be a writer?
OATES
I began writing in high school, consciously training myself by writing novel
after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them. I
remember a three-hundred-page book of interrelated stories that must have
been modeled on Hemingway's In Our Time (I hadn't yet read Dubliners),
though the subject matter was much more romantic than Hemingway's. I
remember a bloated, trifurcated novel that had as its vague model The Sound
and the Fury . . . Fortunately, these experiments were thrown away and I
haven't remembered them until this moment.
Syracuse was a very exciting place academically and intellectually for me. I
doubt that I missed more than half a dozen classes in my four years there,
and none of them in English.
INTERVIEWER
I remember you were in a sorority. It is incredible to contemplate you as a
sorority girl.
OATES
My experience in a sorority wasn't disastrous, but merely despairing. (I tried

to resign but found out that upon joining I had signed some sort of legal
contract.) However, I did make some close friends in the sorority, so the
experience wasn't a total loss. I would never do it again, certainly. In fact, it's
one of the three or four things in my entire life I would never do again.
INTERVIEWER
Why was life in a Syracuse sorority so despairing? Have you written about it?
OATES
The racial and religious bigotry; the asininity of secret ceremonies; the
moronic emphasis upon activities totally unrelated toin fact antithetical to
intellectual exploration; the bullying of the presumably weak by the
presumably strong; the deliberate pursuit of an attractive image for the
group as a whole, no matter how cynical the individuals might have been; the
aping of the worst American traitsboosterism, God-fearingism, smug
ignorance, a craven worship of conformity; the sheer mess of the place once
one got beyond the downstairs . . . I tried to escape in my junior year, but a
connection between sororities and the Dean of Women and the universityhousing office made escape all but impossible, and it seemed that, in my
freshman navet, I had actually signed some sort of contract that had legal
status . . . all of which quite cowed me. I remember a powdered and
perfumed alum explaining the sorority's exclusion of Jews and blacks: You
see, we have conferences at the Lake Placid Club, and wouldn't it be a shame
if all our members couldn't attend . . . Why, it would be embarrassing for
them, wouldn't it?
I was valedictorian of my class, the class of 1960. I fantasized beginning my
address by saying, I managed to do well academically at Syracuse despite
the concerted efforts of my sorority to prevent me . . .
I haven't written about it, and never will. It's simply too stupid and trivial a
subject. To even care about such adolescent nonsense one would have to
have the sensitivity of a John O'Hara, who seems to have taken it all seriously.
INTERVIEWER
I recall you won the poetry contest at Syracuse in your senior year. But your
books of poetry appeared relatively later than your fiction. Were you always
writing poetry?
OATES
No, I really began to write poetry later. The poetry still comes with difficulty, I
must admit. Tiny lyric asides, droll wry enigmatic statements: They aren't
easy, are they? I'm assembling a book which I think will be my lastof

poems, I mean. No one wants to read a novelist's poetry. It's enough too
much, in factto deal with the novels. Strangely enough, my fellow poets
have been magnanimous indeed in accepting me as a poet. I would not have
been surprised had they ignored me, but, in fact, they've been wonderfully
supportive and encouraging. Which contradicts the general notion that poets
are highly competitive and jealous of one another's accomplishments . . .
INTERVIEWER
You say no one wants to read a novelist's poetry. What about Robert Penn
Warren? John Updike? Erica Jong? I suppose Allen Tate and James Dickey are
poets who happened to write novels . . .
OATES
I suppose I was thinking only of hypothetical reactions to my own poetry.
Robert Penn Warren aside, however, there is a tendency on the part of critics
to want very much to categorize writers. Hence one is either a writer of prose
or of poetry. If Lawrence hadn't written those novels he would have been far
more readily acclaimed as one of the greatest poets in the language. As it is,
however, his poetry has been neglected. (At least until recently.)
INTERVIEWER
By the North Gate, your first book, is a collection of short stories, and you
continue to publish them. Is the short story your greatest love? Do you hold
with the old adage that it is more difficult to write a good story than a novel?
OATES
Brief subjects require brief treatments. There is nothing so difficult as a novel,
as anyone knows who has attempted one; a short story is bliss to write set
beside a novel of even ordinary proportions.
But in recent years I haven't been writing much short fiction. I don't quite
know why. All my energies seem to be drawn into longer works. It's probably
the case that my period of greatest productivity is behind me, and I'm
becoming more interested in focusing upon a single work, usually a novel,
and trying to perfect it section by section and page by page.
INTERVIEWER
Nevertheless, you've published more short stories, perhaps, than any other
serious writer in America today. I remember that when you chose the twentyone stories to compose The Wheel of Love, you picked from some ninety that
had been in magazines the two years since your previous collection. What will
become of the seventy or so stories you didn't include in that collection?

Were some added to later collections? Will you ever get back and pick up
uncollected work?
OATES
If I'm serious about a story, I preserve it in book form; otherwise I intend it to
be forgotten. This is true of course for poems and reviews and essays as well.
I went back and selected a number of stories that for thematic reasons were
not included in The Wheel of Love, and put them into a collection called The
Seduction and Other Stories. Each of the story collections is organized around
a central theme and is meant to be read as a wholethe arrangement of the
stories being a rigorous one, not at all haphazard.
INTERVIEWER
You don't drink. Have you tried any consciousness-expanding drugs?
OATES
No. Even tea (because of caffeine) is too strong for me. I must have been
born with a rather sensitive constitution.
INTERVIEWER
Earlier you mentioned Hugh Petrie in The Assassins. He is but one of many
deranged characters in your books. Have you known any genuine madmen?
OATES
Unfortunately, I have been acquainted with a small number of persons who
might be considered mentally disturbed. And others, strangers, are
sometimes drawn my way; I don't know why.
Last week when I went to the university, I wasn't allowed to teach my large
lecture class because, during the night, one of my graduate students had
received a telephone call from a very angry, distraught man who announced
that he intended to kill me. So I had to spend several hours sequestered away
with the head of our department and the head of security at the university
and two special investigators from the Windsor City Police. The situation was
more embarrassing than disturbing. It's the first time anyone has so explicitly
and publicly threatened my lifethere have been sly, indirect threats made
in the past, which I've known enough not to take seriously.
(The man who called my student is a stranger to us all, not even a resident of
Windsor. I have no idea why he's so angry with me. But does a disturbed
person really need a reason . . .?)
INTERVIEWER

How about the less threatening, but nonetheless hurtful, reactions of friends
and relativesany reactions to conscious or unconscious portraits in your
work?
OATES
My parents (and I, as a child) appear very briefly in Wonderland, glimpsed by
the harassed young hero on his way to, or from, Buffalo. Otherwise there are
no portraits of family or relatives in my writing. My mother and father both
respond (rather touchingly at times) to the setting of my stories and novels,
which they recognize. But since there is nothing of a personal nature in the
writing, I have not experienced any difficulties along those lines.
INTERVIEWER
Aside from the singular incident at the university, what are the disadvantages
of being famous?
OATES
I'm not aware of being famous, especially here in Windsor, where the two
major bookstores, Coles', don't even stock my books. The number of people
who are aware of me, let alone who read my writing, is very small.
Consequently I enjoy a certain degree of invisibility and anonymity at the
university, which I might not have at an American universitywhich is one of
the reasons I am so much at home here.
INTERVIEWER
Are you aware of any personal limitations?
OATES
Shyness has prevented me from doing many things; also the amount of work
and responsibility here at Windsor.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer?
OATES
My most conspicuous flaw is . . . well, it's so conspicuous that anyone could
discern it. And my secret flaw is happily secret.
INTERVIEWER
What are the advantages of being a woman writer?

OATES
Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can't
be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers 1, 2,
3 in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like. I haven't much
sense of, or interest in, competition; I can't even grasp what Hemingway and
the epigonic Mailer mean by battling it out with the other talent in the ring. A
work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art. The
living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living .
. . Being a woman allows me a certain invisibility. Like Ellison's Invisible Man.
(My long journal, which must be several hundred pages by now, has the title
Invisible Woman. Because a woman, being so mechanically judged by her
appearance, has the advantage of hiding within itof being absolutely
whatever she knows herself to be, in contrast with what others imagine her to
be. I feel no connection at all with my physical appearance and have often
wondered whether this was a freedom any manwriter or notmight enjoy.)
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it difficult to write from the point of view of the male?
OATES
Absolutely not. I am as sympathetic with any of my male characters as I am
with any of my female characters. In many respects I am closest in
temperament to certain of my male charactersNathan Vickery of Son of the
Morning, for instanceand feel an absolute kinship with them. The Kingdom
of God is within.
INTERVIEWER
Can you tell the sex of a writer from the prose?
OATES
Never.
INTERVIEWER
What male writers have been especially effective, do you think, in their
depiction of women?
OATES
Tolstoy, Lawrence, Shakespeare, Flaubert . . . Very few, really. But then very
few women have been effective in their depiction of men.
INTERVIEWER

Do you enjoy writing?

OATES
I do enjoy writing, yes. A great deal. And I feel somewhat at a loss, aimless
and foolishly sentimental, and disconnected, when I've finished one work and
haven't yet become absorbed in another. All of us who write, work out of a
conviction that we are participating in some sort of communal activity.
Whether my role is writing, or reading and responding, might not be very
important. I take seriously Flaubert's statement that we must love one
another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honoring one
another's creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes
beyond us.
Of course, writing is only one activity out of a vast number of activities that
constitute our lives. It seems to be the one that some of us have
concentrated on, as if we were fated for it. Since I have a great deal of faith in
the processes and the wisdom of the unconscious, and have learned from
experience to take lightly the judgments of the ego and its inevitable doubts,
I never find myself constrained to answer such questions. Life is energy, and
energy is creativity. And even when we as individuals pass on, the energy is
retained in the work of art, locked in it and awaiting release if only someone
will take the time and the care to unlock it.
Author photograph by Nancy Crampton

Julio Cortzar, The Art of Fiction No. 83

Interviewed by Jason Weiss ISSUE 93, FALL 1984
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When Julio Cortzar died of cancer in February 1984 at the age of sixty-nine,
the Madrid newspaper El Pais hailed him as one of Latin Americas greatest
writers and over two days carried eleven full pages of tributes,
reminiscences, and farewells.
Though Cortzar had lived in Paris since 1951, he visited his native Argentina
regularly until he was officially exiled in the early 1970s by the Argentine
junta, who had taken exception to several of his short stories. With the
victory, last fall, of the democratically elected Alfonsn government, Cortzar
was able to make one last visit to his home country. Alfonsns cultural
minister chose to give him no official welcome, afraid that his political views

were too far to the left, but the writer was nonetheless greeted as a returning
hero. One night in Buenos Aires, coming out of a cinema after seeing the new
film based on Osvaldo Sorianos novel, No habra ni mas pena ni olvido,
Cortzar and his friends ran into a student demonstration coming towards
them, which instantly broke file on glimpsing the writer and crowded around
him. The bookstores on the boulevards still being open, the students
hurriedly bought up copies of Cortzars books so that he could sign them. A
kiosk salesman, apologizing that he had no more of Cortzars books, held
out a Carlos Fuentes novel for him to sign.
Cortzar was born in Brussels in 1914. When his family returned to Argentina
after the war, he grew up in Banfield, not far from Buenos Aires. He took a
degree as a schoolteacher and went to work in a town in the province of
Buenos Aires until the early 1940s, writing for himself on the side. One of his
first published stories, House Taken Over, which came to him in a dream,
appeared in 1946 in a magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges. It wasnt until
after Cortzar moved to Paris in 1951, however, that he began publishing in
earnest. In Paris, he worked as a translator and interpreter for UNESCO and
other organizations. Writers he translated included Poe, Defoe, and
Marguerite Yourcenar. In 1963, his second novel Hopscotchabout an
Argentines existential and metaphysical searches through the nightlife of
Paris and Buenos Airesreally established Cortzars name.
Though he is known above all as a modern master of the short story,
Cortzars four novels have demonstrated a ready innovation of form while,
at the same time, exploring basic questions about man in society. These
include The Winners (1960), 62: A Model Kit (1968), based in part on his
experience as an interpreter, and A Manual for Manuel (1973), about the
kidnapping of a Latin American diplomat. But it was Cortzars stories that
most directly claimed his fascination with the fantastic. His most well-known
story was the basis of Antonionis film by the same name, Blow-Up. Five
collections of his stories have appeared in English to date, the most recent
being We Love Glenda So Much. Just before he died, a travel journal was
published, Los autonautas de la cosmopista, on which he collaborated with
his wife, Carol Dunlop, during a voyage from Paris to Marseilles in a camping
van. Published simultaneously in Spanish and French, Cortzar signed all
authors rights and royalties over to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua;
the book has since become a best-seller. Two posthumous collections of his
political articles on Nicaragua and on Argentina have also been published.
Throughout his expatriate years in Paris, Cortzar had lived in various
neighborhoods. In the last decade, royalties from his books enabled him to
buy his own apartment. The apartment, atop a building in a district of
wholesalers and chinaware shops, might have been the setting for one of his
stories: spacious, though crowded with books, its walls lined with paintings by

friends.
Cortzar was a tall man, 6'4", though thinner than his photographs revealed.
The last months before this interview had been particularly difficult for him,
since his last wife, Carol, thirty years his junior, had recently died of cancer. In
addition, his extensive travels, especially to Latin America, had obviously
exhausted him. He had been home barely a week and was finally relaxing in
his favorite chair, smoking a pipe as we talked.

INTERVIEWER
In some of the stories in your most recent book, Deshoras, the fantastic
seems to encroach on the real world more than ever. Have you yourself felt
as if the fantastic and the commonplace are becoming one?
JULIO CORTZAR
Yes, in these recent stories I have the feeling that there is less distance
between what we call the fantastic and what we call the real. In my older
stories, the distance was greater because the fantastic really was fantastic,
and sometimes it touched on the supernatural. Of course, the fantastic takes
on metamorphoses; it changes. The notion of the fantastic we had in the
epoch of the gothic novels in England, for example, has absolutely nothing to
do with our concept of it today. Now we laugh when we read Horace Walpoles
Castle of Otrantothe ghosts dressed in white, the skeletons that walk
around making noises with their chains. These days, my notion of the
fantastic is closer to what we call reality. Perhaps because reality approaches
the fantastic more and more.
INTERVIEWER
Much more of your time in recent years has been spent in support of various
liberation struggles in Latin America. Hasnt that also helped bring the real
and the fantastic closer for you, and made you more serious?
CORTZAR
Well, I dont like the idea of serious, because I dont think I am serious, at
least not in the sense where one speaks of a serious man or a serious
woman. But in these last few years, my efforts concerning certain Latin
American regimesArgentina, Chile, Uruguay, and now above all Nicaragua
have absorbed me to such a point that I have used the fantastic in certain
stories to deal with this subjectin a way thats very close to reality, in my
opinion. So, I feel less free than before. That is, thirty years ago I was writing
things that came into my head and I judged them only by aesthetic criteria.

Now, though I continue to judge them by aesthetic criteria, first of all because
Im a writerIm now a writer whos tormented, very preoccupied by the
situation in Latin America; consequently that often slips into my writing, in a
conscious or in an unconscious way. But despite the stories with very precise
references to ideological and political questions, my stories, in essence,
havent changed. Theyre still stories of the fantastic.
The problem for an engag writer, as they call them now, is to continue being
a writer. If what he writes becomes simply literature with a political content, it
can be very mediocre. Thats what has happened to a number of writers. So,
the problem is one of balance. For me, what I do must always be literature,
the highest I can do . . . to go beyond the possible. But, at the same time, to
try to put in a mix of contemporary reality. And thats a very difficult balance.
In the story in Deshoras about the rats, Satarsawhich is an episode based
on the struggle against the Argentine guerrillasthe temptation was to stick
to the political level alone.
INTERVIEWER
What has been the response to such stories? Was there much difference in
the response you got from literary people and that which you got from
political ones?
CORTZAR
Of course. The bourgeois readers in Latin America who are indifferent to
politics, or those who align themselves with the right wing, well, they dont
worry about the problems that worry methe problems of exploitation, of
oppression, and so on. Those people regret that my stories often take a
political turn. Other readers, above all the youngwho share my sentiments,
my need to struggle, and who love literaturelove these stories. The Cubans
relish Meeting. Apocalypse at Solentiname is a story that Nicaraguans
read and reread with great pleasure.
INTERVIEWER
What has determined your increased political involvement?
CORTZAR
The military in Latin Americatheyre the ones who make me work harder. If
they were removed, if there were a change, then I could rest a little and work
on poems and stories that would be exclusively literary. But its they who give
me work to do.
INTERVIEWER

You have said at various times that, for you, literature is like a game. In what
ways?
CORTZAR
For me, literature is a form of play. But Ive always added that there are two
forms of play: football, for example, which is basically a game, and then
games that are very profound and serious. When children play, though
theyre amusing themselves, they take it very seriously. Its important. Its
just as serious for them now as love will be ten years from now. I remember
when I was little and my parents used to say, Okay, youve played enough,
come take a bath now. I found that completely idiotic, because, for me, the
bath was a silly matter. It had no importance whatsoever, while playing with
my friends was something serious. Literature is like thatits a game, but its
a game one can put ones life into. One can do everything for that game.
INTERVIEWER
When did you become interested in the fantastic? Were you very young?
CORTZAR
It began in my childhood. Most of my young classmates had no sense of the
fantastic. They took things as they were . . . this is a plant, that is an
armchair. But for me, things were not that well defined. My mother, whos still
alive and is a very imaginative woman, encouraged me. Instead of saying,
No, no, you should be serious, she was pleased that I was imaginative;
when I turned towards the world of the fantastic, she helped by giving me
books to read. I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time when I was only nine. I
stole the book to read because my mother didnt want me to read it; she
thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill
for three months, because I believed in it . . . dur comme fer as the French
say. For me, the fantastic was perfectly natural; I had no doubts at all. Thats
the way things were. When I gave those kinds of books to my friends, theyd
say, But no, we prefer to read cowboy stories. Cowboys were especially
popular at the time. I didnt understand that. I preferred the world of the
supernatural, of the fantastic.
INTERVIEWER
When you translated Poes complete works many years later, did you
discover new things for yourself from so close a reading?
CORTZAR
Many, many things. I explored his language, which is criticized by both the
English and the Americans because they find it too baroque. Since Im neither

English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are
aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that doesnt mean
anything compared to his genius. To write, in those times, The Fall of the
House of Usher, or Ligeia, or Berenice, or The Black Cat, any of them,
shows a true genius for the fantastic and for the supernatural. Yesterday, I
visited a friend on the rue Edgar Allan Poe. There is a plaque on the street
which reads, Edgar Poe, English Writer. He wasnt English at all! We should
have it changedwell both protest!
INTERVIEWER
In your writing, in addition to the fantastic, there is a real warmth and
affection for your characters.
CORTZAR
When my characters are children and adolescents, I have a lot of tenderness
for them. I think they are very alive in my novels and in my stories; I treat
them with a lot of love. When I write a story where the character is an
adolescent, I am the adolescent while I am writing it. With the adult
characters, its something else.
INTERVIEWER
Are many of your characters based on people that youve known?
CORTZAR
I wouldnt say many, but there are a few. Very often there are characters who
are a mixture of two or three people. I have put together a female character,
for example, from two women I have known. That gives the character in the
story or the book a personality thats more complex, more difficult.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean that when you feel the need to thicken a character, you
combine two together?
CORTZAR
Things dont work like that. Its the characters who direct me. That is, I see a
character, hes there, and I recognize someone I knew, or occasionally two
who are a bit mixed together, but then that stops. Afterwards, the character
acts on his own account. He says things . . . I never know what any of them
are going to say when Im writing dialogue. Really, its up to them. Me, Im
just typing out what theyre saying. Sometimes I burst out laughing, or I
throw out a page and say, There, there youve said silly things. Out! And I
put in another page and start over again with their dialogue.

INTERVIEWER
So its not the characters youve known that impel you to write?
CORTZAR
No, not at all. Often, I have an idea for a story, but there arent any
characters yet. Ill have a strange idea: somethings going to happen in a
house in the country, I see . . . Im very visual when I write, I see it all, I see
everything. So, I see this house in the country and then, abruptly, I begin to
situate the characters. At that point, one of the characters might be someone
I knew. But its not for sure. In the end, most of my characters are invented.
Now, of course, theres myself. In Hopscotch, there are many
autobiographical references in the character of Oliveira. Its not me, but
theres a lot that derives from my early bohemian days in Paris. Yet readers
who read Oliveira as Cortzar in Paris would be mistaken. No, no, I was very
different.
INTERVIEWER
Is this because you dont wish your writing to be autobiographical?
CORTZAR
I dont like autobiography. I will never write my memoirs. Autobiographies of
others interest me, of course, but not my own. If I wrote my autobiography, I
would have to be truthful and honest. I couldnt tell an imaginary
autobiography. And so, I would be doing a historians job, being a selfhistorian, and that bores me. Because I prefer to invent, to imagine. Of
course, very often when I have ideas for a novel or a story, situations and
moments of my life naturally place themselves in that context. In my story
Deshoras, the idea of the boy being in love with his pals older sister is, in
fact, based on an autobiographical situation. So there is a small part of it
thats autobiographical, but from there on, its the fantastic or the imaginary
which dominates.
INTERVIEWER
How do you start with your stories? By any particular entry, an image?
CORTZAR
With me stories and novels can start anywhere. As for the writing itself, when
I begin to write, the story has been turning around in me a long time,
sometimes for weeks. But not in any way thats clear; its a sort of general
idea of the story. Perhaps that house where theres a red plant in one corner,
and I know theres an old man who walks around in this house. Thats all I

know. It happens like that. And then there are the dreams. During this
gestation period my dreams are full of references and allusions to what is
going to be in the story. Sometimes the whole story is in a dream. One of my
first and most popular stories, House Taken Over, is a nightmare I had. I got
up immediately and wrote it. But in general, what comes out of the dreams
are fragments of references. That is, my subconscious is in the process of
working through a storywhen I am dreaming, its being written inside there.
So when I say that I begin anywhere, its because I dont know what, at that
point, is to be the beginning or the end. When I start to write, thats the
beginning. I havent decided that the story has to start like that; it simply
starts there and it continues, and very often I have no clear idea about the
endingI dont know whats going to happen. Its only gradually, as the story
goes on, that things become clearer and abruptly I see the ending.
INTERVIEWER
So you are discovering the story while you are writing it?
CORTZAR
Thats right. Its like improvising in jazz. You dont ask a jazz musician, But
what are you going to play? Hell laugh at you. He has a theme, a series of
chords he has to respect, and then he takes up his trumpet or his saxophone
and he begins. Its not a question of idea. He performs through a series of
different internal pulsations. Sometimes it comes out well, sometimes it
doesnt. Its the same with me. Im a bit embarrassed to sign my stories
sometimes. The novels, no, because the novels I work on a lot; theres a
whole architecture. But my stories, its as if they were dictated to me by
something that is in me, but its not me whos responsible. Well, since it does
appear they are mine even so, I guess I should accept them!
INTERVIEWER
Are there certain aspects of writing a story that always pose a problem for
you?
CORTZAR
In general, no, because as I was explaining, the story is already made
somewhere inside me. So, it has its dimension, its structure; if its going to be
a very short story or a fairly long story, all that is as if decided in advance.
But in recent years Ive started to sense some problems. I reflect more in
front of the page. I write more slowly. And I write in a way thats more spare.
Certain critics have reproached me for that, theyve told me that little by little
Im losing that suppleness in my stories. I seem to be saying what I want to
with a greater economy of means. I dont know if its for better or for worse

in any case, its my way of writing now.

INTERVIEWER
You were saying that with the novels there is a whole architecture. Does that
mean that you work very differently?
CORTZAR
The first thing I wrote in Hopscotch was a chapter that is now in the middle.
Its the chapter where the characters put out a plank to cross from one
window of an apartment house to another. I wrote that without knowing why I
was writing it. I saw the characters, I saw the situationit was in Buenos
Aires. It was very hot, I remember, and I was next to the window with my
typewriter. I saw this situation of a guy whos trying to make his wife go
across the plankbecause he wont go himselfto get some silly thing, some
nails. I wrote all that, which was long, some forty pages, and when Id
finished I said to myself, All right, but what have I done? Because thats not a
story. What is it? Then I understood that I was launched on a novel, but that I
couldnt continue from that point. I had to stop there and go back and write
the whole section in Paris which comes before, which is the whole background
of Oliveira, and when I finally arrived at this chapter about walking the plank,
then I went on from there.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise much when you write?
CORTZAR
Very little. That comes from the fact that the thing has already been at work
inside me. When I see the rough drafts of certain of my writer friends, where
everything is revised, everythings changed, moved around, and there are
arrows all over the place . . . no no no. My manuscripts are very clean.
INTERVIEWER
Jos Lezama Lima in Paradiso has Cem saying that the baroque . . . is what
has real interest in Spain and Hispanic America. Why do you think that is so?
CORTZAR
I cannot reply as an expert. True, the baroque is greatly important in Latin
America, both in the arts and in the literature as well. The baroque can offer a
great richness; it lets the imagination soar in all its many spiraling directions,
as in a baroque church with its decorative angels and all that, or in baroque
music. But I distrust the baroque. The baroque writers, very often, let
themselves go too easily in their writing. They write in five pages what one

could very well write in one. I too must have fallen into the baroque because I
am Latin American, but I have always had a mistrust of it. I dont like turgid,
voluminous sentences, full of adjectives and descriptions, purring and purring
into the readers ear. I know its very charming, of course. Its very beautiful
but its not me. Im more on the side of Jorge Luis Borges. He has always been
an enemy of the baroque; he tightened his writing, as if with pliers. Well, I
write in a very different way than Borges, but the great lesson he taught me
is one of economy. He taught me when I began to read him, being very
young, that one had to try to say what one wanted to with economy, but with
a beautiful economy. Its the difference, perhaps, between a plant, which
would be considered baroque, with its multiplication of leaves, often very
beautiful, and a precious stone, a crystalthat for me is more beautiful still.
INTERVIEWER
What are your writing habits? Have certain things changed?
CORTZAR
The one thing that hasnt changed, and never will, is the total anarchy and
the disorder. I have absolutely no method. When I feel like writing a story I let
everything drop; I write the story. And sometimes when I write a story, in the
month or two that follows I will write two or three more. In general, the
stories come in series. Writing one leaves me in a receptive state, and then I
catch another. You see the sort of image I use, but its like that; the story
drops inside of me. But then a year can go by where I write nothing . . .
nothing. Of course, these last few years I have spent a good deal of my time
at the typewriter writing political articles. The texts Ive written about
Nicaragua, everything Ive written about Argentina, have nothing to do with
literaturetheyre militant things.
INTERVIEWER
Youve often said that it was the Cuban revolution that awakened you to
questions of Latin America and its problems.
CORTZAR
And I say it again.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have preferred places for writing?
CORTZAR
In fact, no. In the beginning, when I was younger and physically more
resistant, here in Paris for example, I wrote a large part of Hopscotch in cafs.

Because the noise didnt bother me and, on the contrary, it was a very
congenial place. I worked a lot thereI read or I wrote. But with age Ive
become more complicated. I write when Im sure of having some silence. I
cant write if theres music, thats absolutely out. Music is one thing and
writing is another. I need a certain calm; but, having said this, a hotel, an
airplane sometimes, a friends house, or here at home are places where I can
write.
INTERVIEWER
What about Paris? What gave you the courage to pick up and move off to
Paris when you did, more than thirty years ago?
CORTZAR
Courage? No, it didnt take much courage. I simply had to accept the idea
that coming to Paris, and cutting the bridges with Argentina at that time
meant being very poor and having problems making a living. But that didnt
worry me. I knew in one way or another I was going to manage. I came to
Paris primarily because Paris, French culture on the whole, held a strong
attraction for me. I had read French literature with a passion in Argentina, so I
wanted to be here and get to know the streets and the places one finds in the
books, in the novels. To go through the streets of Balzac or of Baudelaire . . .
it was a very romantic voyage. I was, I am, very romantic. In fact, I have to be
rather careful when I write, because very often I could let myself fall into . . . I
wouldnt say bad taste, perhaps not, but a bit in the direction of an
exaggerated romanticism. In my private life, I dont need to control myself. I
really am very sentimental, very romantic. Im a tender person; I have a lot of
tenderness to give. What I give now to Nicaragua, its tenderness. It is also
the political conviction that the Sandinistas are right in what theyre doing
and that theyre leading an admirable struggle; but its not only the political
impetus, its that theres an enormous tenderness because its a people I
love, as I love the Cubans, and I love the Argentines. Well, all that makes up
part of my character. In my writing I have had to watch myself, above all
when I was young. I wrote things then that were tearjerkers. That was really
romanticism, the roman rose. My mother would read them and cry.
INTERVIEWER
Nearly all your writing that people know dates from your arrival in Paris. But
you were writing a lot before, werent you? A few things had already been
published.
CORTZAR
Ive been writing since the age of nine, right up through my whole

adolescence and early youth. In my early youth I was already capable of

writing stories and novels, which showed me that I was on the right path. But
I wasnt eager to publish. I was very severe with myself, and I continue to be.
I remember that my peers, when they had written some poems or a small
novel, searched for a publisher right away. I would tell myself, No, youre not
publishing, you hang on to that. I kept certain things, and others I threw out.
When I did publish for the first time I was over thirty years old; it was just
before my departure for France. That was my first book of stories, Bestiario,
which came out in 51, the same month that I took the boat to come here.
Before that, I had published a little text called Los reyes, which is a dialogue.
A friend who had a lot of money, who did small editions for himself and his
friends, had done a private edition. And thats all. No, theres another thing
a sin of youtha book of sonnets. I published it myself, but with a
pseudonym.
INTERVIEWER
You are the lyricist of a recent album of tangos, Trottoirs de Buenos Aires.
What got you started writing tangos?
CORTZAR
Well, I am a good Argentine and above all a porteothat is, a resident of
Buenos Aires, because its the port. The tango was our music, and I grew up
in an atmosphere of tangos. We listened to them on the radio, because the
radio started when I was little, and right away it was tango after tango. There
were people in my family, my mother and an aunt, who played tangos on the
piano and sang them. Through the radio, we began to listen to Carlos Gardel
and the great singers of the time. The tango became like a part of my
consciousness and its the music that sends me back to my youth again and
to Buenos Aires. So, Im quite caught up in the tango, all while being very
critical, because Im not one of those Argentines who believes that the tango
is the wonder of wonders. I think that the tango on the whole, especially next
to jazz, is a very poor music. It is poor but it is beautiful. Its like those plants
that are very simple, that one cant compare to an orchid or a rosebush, but
which have an extraordinary beauty in themselves. In recent years, friends of
mine have played tangos here; the Cuarteto Cedrn are great friends, and a
fine bandonen player named Juan Jos Mosaliniso weve listened to
tangos, talked about tangos. Then one day a poem came to me like that,
which I thought perhaps could be set to music, I didnt really know. And then,
looking among unpublished poems (most of my poems are unpublished), I
found some short poems which those fellows could set to music, and they
did. Also, weve done the opposite as well. Cedrn gave me a musical theme
to which I wrote the words. So Ive done it both ways.

INTERVIEWER
In the biographical notes in your books, it says you are also an amateur
trumpet player. Have you ever played with any groups?
CORTZAR
No. Thats a bit of a legend that was invented by my very dear friend Paul
Blackburn, who died quite young unfortunately. He knew that I played the
trumpet a little, mainly for myself at home. So he would always tell me, But
you should meet some musicians to play with. Id say, No, as the Americans
say, I havent got what it takes. I didnt have the talent; I was just playing
for myself. I would put on a Jelly Roll Morton record, or Armstrong, or early
Ellingtonwhere the melody is easier to follow, especially the blues which
has a given scheme. And I would have fun hearing them play and adding my
trumpet. I played along with them . . . but it certainly wasnt with them! I
never dared approach jazz musicians; now my trumpet is lost somewhere in
the other room there. Blackburn put that in one of the blurbs. And because
there is a photo of me playing the trumpet, people thought I really could play
well. As I never wanted to publish before being sure, it was the same with the
trumpetI never wanted to play before being sure. And that day has never
arrived.
INTERVIEWER
Have you worked on any novels since A Manual for Manuel?
CORTZAR
Alas no, for reasons that are very clear. Its due to political work. For me, a
novel requires a concentration and a quantity of time, at least a year, to work
tranquilly and not to abandon it. And now, I cannot. A week ago I didnt know
I would be leaving for Nicaragua in three days. When I return I wont know
whats going to happen next. But this novel is already written. Its there, its
in my dreams. I dream all the time of this novel. I dont know what happens in
the novel, but I have an idea. As in the stories, I know it will be something
fairly long, with some elements of the fantastic, but not too many. It will be in
the genre of A Manual for Manuel, where the fantastic elements are mixed in;
but it wont be a political book. It will be a book of pure literature. I hope that
life will give me a sort of desert island, even if the desert island is this
room . . . and a year, I ask for a year. But when these bastardsthe
Hondurans, the Somocistas and Reaganare in the act of destroying
Nicaragua, I dont have my island. I couldnt begin to write, because I would
be obsessed constantly by that problem. It demands top priority.
INTERVIEWER

And it can be difficult enough as it is balancing life and literature.

CORTZAR
Yes and no. It depends on the kind of priorities. If the priorities are, like those
I just mentioned, touching on the moral responsibility of an individual, I would
agree. But I know many people who are always complaining, Oh, Id like to
write my novel, but I have to sell the house, and then there are the taxes,
what am I going to do? Reasons like, I work in the office all day, how do you
expect me to write? Me, I worked all day at UNESCO and then I came home
and wrote Hopscotch. When one wants to write, one writes. If one is
condemned to write, one writes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you work anymore as a translator or interpreter?
CORTZAR
No, thats over. I lead a very simple life. I dont need much money to buy the
things I like: records, books, tobacco. So now I can live from my royalties.
Theyve translated me into so many languages that I receive enough money
to live on. I have to be a little careful; I cant go out and buy myself a yacht,
but since I have absolutely no intention of buying a yacht . . .
INTERVIEWER
Have fame and success been pleasurable?
CORTZAR
Ah, listen, Ill say something I shouldnt say because no one will believe it, but
success isnt a pleasure for me. Im glad to be able to live from what I write,
so I have to put up with the popular and critical side of success. But I was
happier as a man when I was unknown. Much happier. Now I cant go to Latin
America or to Spain without being recognized every ten yards, and the
autographs, the embraces . . . Its very moving, because theyre readers who
are frequently quite young. Im happy that they like what I do, but its terribly
distressing for me on the level of privacy. I cant go to a beach in Europe; in
five minutes theres a photographer. I have a physical appearance that I cant
disguise; if I were small I could shave and put on sunglasses, but with my
height, my long arms and all that, they discover me from afar. On the other
hand, there are very beautiful things: I was in Barcelona a month ago,
walking around the Gothic Quarter one evening, and there was an American
girl, very pretty, playing the guitar very well and singing. She was seated on
the ground singing to earn her living. She sang a bit like Joan Baez, a very
pure, clear voice. There was a group of young people from Barcelona

listening. I stopped to listen to her, but I stayed in the shadows. At one point,
one of these young men who was about twenty, very young, very handsome,
approached me. He had a cake in his hand. He said, Julio, take a piece. So I
took a piece and I ate it, and I told him, Thanks a lot for coming up and
giving that to me. He said to me, But, listen, I give you so little next to what
youve given me. I said, Dont say that, dont say that, and we embraced
and he went away. Well, things like that, thats the best recompense for my
work as a writer. That a boy or a girl comes up to speak to you and to offer
you a piece of cake, its wonderful. Its worth the trouble of having written.

Edna OBrien, The Art of Fiction No. 82

Interviewed by Shusha Guppy ISSUE 92, SUMMER 1984
undefined
EDNA O'BRIEN.

Edna OBrien was born in the west of Ireland in a small village she describes
as enclosed, fervid, and bigoted. Literature was taboo, and those books
that penetrated the parish were loaned by the page. OBriens father was a
farmer who carried on in that glorious line of profligate Irishmen. Her
mother, who had worked as a maid in Brooklyn, always yearned to return to
America. OBriens childhood was unhappy, but she believes it gave her both
the need and the impetus to write. Writing, she says, is the product of a
deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.
After finishing primary school in her local village, OBrien was sent to convent
school in Galway, and later to Dublin, where she studied at the
Pharmaceutical College and worked in a chemists shop. During this time, she
met and married Ernst Gabler, a novelist, with whom she had two sons. (The
marriage was dissolved ten years later.) In 1960, the family moved to London,
where OBrien began to write.
OBriens first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1961. It is the story
of two girls who grew up in the Irish countryside, attend a convent school
(from which they are expelled), and journey to Dublin and London in search of
love and adventure. OBriens subsequent novelsThe Lonely Girl, Girls in
Their Married Bliss, August is a Wicked Month, and Nightfurther explore the
relationship between the sexes, often from the point of view of women who
lose themselves in love, and later must struggle to regain their sovereignty.
OBrien has also written two plays, three screenplays, and several collections
of short stories, all of which contribute to her reputation as one of Irelands

foremost women of letters. Her latest play, Virginia, based on the life of
Virginia Woolf, was produced in London last year to critical acclaim. It is due
to open in New York this autumn at Joseph Papps Public Theater, with Kate
Nelligan in the title role.
Now in her forties, OBrien resembles one of her own heroines: beautiful in a
subtle, wistful way, with reddish-blond hair, green eyes, and a savage sense
of humor. She lives alone in an airy, spacious apartment in Little Venice,
London, near the Canal. From her balcony, wrought-iron steps lead down to a
vast tree-filled park, where OBrien often can be found strolling during breaks
from her work. The following interview took place in her writing rooma
large, comfortable study cluttered with books, notebooks, records, and
periodicals. The day I was there, the room was warmed by a log fire burning
in the fireplace, and even more so by OBriens rich, softly accented Irish
voice.

INTERVIEWER
You once said that as far back as you can remember you have been a writer.
At what point did you actually start writing literature?
EDNA OBRIEN
When I say I have written from the beginning, I mean that all real writers
write from the beginning, that the vocation, the obsession, is already there,
and that the obsession derives from an intensity of feeling which normal life
cannot accommodate. I started writing snippets when I was eight or nine, but
I wrote my first novel when I left Ireland and came to live in London. I had
never been outside Ireland and it was November when I arrived in England. I
found everything so different, so alien. Waterloo Station was full of people
who were nameless, faceless. There were wreaths on the Cenotaph for
Remembrance Sunday, and I felt bewildered and lostan outsider. So in a
sense The Country Girls, which I wrote in those first few weeks after my
arrival, was my experience of Ireland and my farewell to it. But something
happened to my style which I will tell you about. I had been trying to write
short bits, and these were always flowery and overlyrical. Shortly after I
arrived in London I saw an advertisement for a lecture given by Arthur
Mizener [author of a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise] on
Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You must remember that I had no literary
education, but a fervid religious one. So I went to the lecture and it was like a
thunderboltSaul of Tarsus on his horse! Mizener read out the first paragraph
of A Farewell to Arms and I couldnt believe itthis totally uncluttered,
precise, true prose, which was also very moving and lyrical. I can say that the
two things came together then: my being ready for the revelation and my

urgency to write. The novel wrote itself, so to speak, in a few weeks. All the
time I was writing it I couldnt stop crying, although it is a fairly buoyant,
funny book. But it was the separation from Ireland which brought me to the
point where I had to write, though I had always been in love with literature.
INTERVIEWER
If you had always loved literature, why did you study chemistry at university
rather than English?
OBRIEN
The usual reason, family. My family was radically opposed to anything to do
with literature. Although Ireland has produced so many great writers, there is
a deep suspicion about writing there. Somehow they know that writing is
dangerous, seditious, as if In the beginning was the Word and the Word was
with God and the Word was God. I was an obedient little girlthough I hate
to admit it now!and went along with my familys wishes. I worked in a
chemists shop and then studied at the Pharmaceutical College at night.
INTERVIEWER
The protagonist of The Country Girls also works in a shop. Is the novel
autobiographical?
OBRIEN
The novel is autobiographical insofar as I was born and bred in the west of
Ireland, educated at a convent, and was full of romantic yearnings, coupled
with a sense of outrage. But any book that is any good must be, to some
extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate
emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion,
is what finally matters. With luck, talent, and studiousness, one manages to
make a little pearl, or egg, or something . . . But what gives birth to it is what
happens inside the soul and the mind, and that has almost always to do with
conflict. And lossan innate sense of tragedy.
INTERVIEWER
What Thomas Hardy called the sadness of things, and Unamuno el
sentimiento trgico de la vida?
OBRIEN
Precisely. Not just subjective sadness, though you have to experience it in
order to know it, but also objective. And the more I read about writers, their
letterssay Flaubertsthe more I realize it. Flaubert was in a way like a
woman. There he was, in Rouen, yearning for the bright lights of Paris and

hectic affairs, yet deliberately keeping away from all that, isolating himself, in
order to burn and luxuriate in the affliction of his own emotions. So writing, I
think, is an interestingly perverse occupation. It is quite sick in the sense of
normal human enjoyment of life, because the writer is always removed, the
way an actor never is. An actor is with the audience, a writer is not with his
readers, and by the time the work appears, he or she is again incarcerated in
the next bookor in barrenness. So for both men and women writers, writing
is an eminently masochistic exercisethough I wonder what Norman Mailer
would say to that!
INTERVIEWER
Doesnt the theory of masochism apply to all artists, whatever the art form?
OBRIEN
To some extent. I was reading van Goghs letters. My God! Im surprised he
cut off only one ear, that he wasnt altogether shredded in pieces! But a
woman writer has a double dose of masochism: the masochism of the woman
and that of the artist. No way to dodge it or escape from it. Men are better at
escaping their psyches and their consciences. But there is a certain dogged
strength in realizing that you can make those delirious journeys and come
through.
INTERVIEWER
Some dont. There is a high rate of suicide, alcoholism, madness among
writers.
OBRIEN
It is only by the grace of God, and perhaps willpower, that one comes through
each time. Many wonderful writers write one or two books and then kill
themselves. Sylvia Plath for instance. She was much younger than Virginia
Woolf when she committed suicide, but if she had survived that terrible crisis,
I feel she would have written better books. I have this theory that Woolf
feared that the flame of her talent was extinguished or dwindling because her
last book, Between the Acts, lacked the soaring genius of the others. When a
writer, or an artist, has the feeling that he cant do it anymore, he descends
into hell. So you must keep in mind that although it may stop, it can come
back. When I was a child in Ireland, a spring would suddenly appear and yield
forth buckets of beautiful clear water, then just as suddenly it would dry up.
The water-diviners would come with their rods and sometimes another spring
would be found. One has to be ones own water-diviner. It is hard, especially
as writers are always anxious, always on the runfrom the telephone, from
people, from responsibilities, from the distractions of this world. The other

thing that can destroy talent is too much grief. Yeats said, Too much sorrow
can make a stone of the heart. I often wonder, if Emily Bront had lived to
be fifty, what kind of books would she have written? Her life was so penalizing
and Charlottes tooutterly without sex. Emily was thirty when she wrote
Wuthering Heights. I think the grinding suffering might have killed her talent
later. It is not that you have to be happythat would be asking too much
but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it
the generosity so necessary to create.
INTERVIEWER
So the catalyst for your own work was that lecture on Fitzgerald and
Hemingway. Before that you said that you read a great deal in Ireland, partly
to escape. What sort of books did you read? And which ones influenced you
most?
OBRIEN
Looking back on it, it was not so much escape as nourishment. Of course
there is an element of escape as well, that entering temporarily into a
different world. But I think literature is food for the soul and the heart. There
are books that are pure escapism: thrillers, detective and spy novels, but I
cant read them, because they dont deliver to me. Whereas from one page of
Dostoyevsky I feel renewed, however depressing the subject. The first book I
ever boughtIve still got itwas called Introducing James Joyce, by T. S.
Eliot. It contained a short story, a piece from Portrait of the Artist, some other
pieces, and an introduction by Eliot. I read a scene from Portrait which is the
Christmas dinner when everything begins pleasantly: a fire, largesse, the blue
flame of light on the dark plum pudding, the revelry before the flare-up
ensues between people who were for Parnell and those who were against
him. Parnell had been dead for a long time, but the Irish, being Irish, persist
with history. Reading that book made me realize that I wanted literature for
the rest of my life.
INTERVIEWER
And you became a ferocious reader, first of Joyce, then of others. Who else
did you read in those early days?
OBRIEN
I am a slow reader, because I want to savor and recall what I read. The
excitement and sense of discovery is not the same as in those days when I
would get thoroughly wrapped up in Vanity Fair or War and Peace. Now I set
myself a task of reading one great book each year. Last year I read Bleak
House, which I think is the greatest English novelI read a few pages a day.

But ones taste changes so much. I mentioned Scott Fitzgerald, whom I read,
oh, so lovingly and thoroughly! I loved Tender Is the Night and The Great
Gatsby, which is a flawless novel. So I can say that he was one of my early
influences. But now I know that fundamentally I respond to European
literature in all its dark ramifications. I think the Russians are unsurpassable.
Of course Joyce did something extraordinary: he threw out the entire heritage
of English literaturelanguage, story, structure, everythingand created a
new and stupendous work. But for emotional gravity, no one can compare
with the Russians. When I first read Chekhovs short stories, before I saw his
plays, I knew I had heard the voice that I loved most in the whole world. I
wrote to my sister, Read Chekhovhe does not write, he breathes life off the
page. And he was, and still is, my greatest influence, especially in shortstory writing.
INTERVIEWER
Later on, when you tried your hand at drama, did Chekhov come to your
rescue there as well?
OBRIEN
I think so, though it is very dangerous to take Chekhov as a model. His
dramatic genius is so mysterious; he does what seems to be the impossible,
in that he makes dramatic something that is desultory. And of course it is not
desultoryindeed, it is as tightly knit as that Persian carpet. Shakespeare is
God. He knows everything and expresses it with such a density of poetry and
humor and power that the mind boggles. But then he had great themes
Othello, Hamlet, the history plays. Chekhov, on the other hand, tells you, or
seems to tell you, of a profligate family that is losing an orchard, or some
sisters who yearn for Moscow, and inside it is a whole web of life and love and
failure. I think that despite his emphasis on wanting to be funny, he was a
tragic man. In a letter to his wife, actress Olga Knipper, he says, It is nine
oclock in the evening, you are going to play act three of my play, and I am as
lonely as a coffin!
INTERVIEWER
The greatness of the Russian classics must be due in part to the vastness and
variety of their country, the harshness of climate, and the cruelty and
roughness of their society (which hasnt really changed) and which enhances
the intensity of the emotions and the extremes of behavior.
OBRIEN
Certainly. It makes for endurancethose long, savage winters. Also being
throttled as they have always been. The more you strangle a man, the deeper

he screams. Boris Pasternak put his pain to immortal use in Dr. Zhivago.
INTERVIEWER
Did that first book on Joyce send you to read the whole of Joyce?
OBRIEN
Yes, but I was too young then. Later I read Ulysses, and at one point I thought
of writing a book on Joyce, comme tout le monde! I read a lot of books about
Joyce and wrote a monograph. Then I realized that there were already too
many books on him and that the best thing you could read about Joyce was
Joyce himself.
INTERVIEWER
How do you assess him now, and how is he regarded in Ireland?
OBRIEN
He is beyond assessmentgigantic. I sometimes read bits of Finnegans Wake
and feel my brain begin to sizzle. Joyce went mad with genius. When you read
Dubliners and Finnegans Wake you feel that the man underwent a
metamorphosis between twenty-five and sixty. H. G. Wells said that Finnegans
Wake was an immense riddle, and people find it too difficult to read. I have
yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of itexcept
perhaps my friend Richard Ellmann. Joyce killed himself with exertion. He
went beyond us into a labyrinth of language, and I dont know whether that
was a loss or a gain.
INTERVIEWER
The generation before you in Ireland had an important literary scene: Yeats
and Lady Gregory and the Abbey Theatre group, and all the people around
them, which ran parallel to Londons Bloomsbury group and Eliots circle. Did
you have anything similar in Ireland when you started?
OBRIEN
Nothing on that level. There was a sort of Irish literary scene but I wasnt part
of it. One reason was poverty, another that I didnt have an entre; I was just
a chemistry student in a bed-sit. I heard of people like Sean OFaolain, Frank
OConnor. Samuel Beckett had left and vowed never to return, Sean OCasey
was in England. But it was good for me not to be part of any scene because it
meant that I had to do my apprenticeship alone. Sweet are the uses of
adversity, are they not?
INTERVIEWER

What about women writers? You havent mentioned any as a major influence
so far.
OBRIEN
Every woman novelist has been influenced by the Bronts. Wuthering Heights
and Jane Eyre. The poetry of Emily Dickinson, the early books of Elizabeth
Bowenespecially the one she wrote about her home in Ireland, Bowens
Court. My admiration for Jane Austen came much later, and I also love the
Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Nowadays there are too many writers, and I
think one of the reasons for the deterioration of language and literature in the
last forty years has been the spawning of inferior novels. Everybody writes
novelsjournalists, broadcasters, tv announcers . . . it is a free-for-all! But
writing is a vocation, like being a nun or a priest. I work at my writing as an
athlete does at his training, taking it very seriously. Whether a novel is
autobiographical or not does not matter. What is important is the truth in it
and the way that truth is expressed. I think a casual or frivolous attitude is
pernicious.
INTERVIEWER
Is there any area of fiction that you find women are better equipped to
explore?
OBRIEN
Yes. Women are better at emotions and the havoc those emotions wreak. But
it must be said that Anna Karenina is the most believable heroine. The last
scene where she goes to the station and looks down at the rails and thinks of
Vronskys rejection is terrible in its depiction of despair. Women, on the
whole, are better at plumbing the depths. A woman artist can produce a
perfect gem, as opposed to a huge piece of rock carving a man might
produce. It is not a limitation of talent or intelligence, it is just a different way
of looking at the world.
INTERVIEWER
So you dont believe in the feminist argument that the differences between
men and women are a question of nurture and not of nature; that women
look at the world differently because they have been conditioned to do so?
OBRIEN
Not in the least! I believe that we are fundamentally, biologically, and
therefore psychologically different. I am not like any man I have met, ever,
and that divide is what both interests me and baffles me. A lot of things have
been said by feminists about equality, about liberation, but not all of these

things are gospel truth. They are opinions the way my books are opinions,
nothing more. Of course I would like women to have a better time but I dont
see it happening, and for a very simple and primal reason: people are pretty
savage towards each other, be they men or women.
INTERVIEWER
Yet your own success is, to a certain degree, due to the fact that your writing
coincided with the rise of the feminist movement, because invariably it
portrayed loving, sensitive, good women, being victimized by hard, callous
men, and it hit the right note at the right time. Would you agree with that?
OBRIEN
I would think so. However, I am not the darling of the feminists. They think I
am too preoccupied with old-fashioned themes like love and longing. Though
one woman in Ms. magazine pointed out that I send bulletins from
battlefronts where other women do not go. I think I do. The reason why I
resent being lectured at is that my psyche is so weighed down with its own
paraphernalia! No man or woman from outside could prescribe to me what to
do. I have enough trouble keeping madness at bay.
INTERVIEWER
Your description of small towns and their enclosed communities reminds me
of some of Americas Southern writers, like Faulkner. Did they influence you?
OBRIEN
Faulkner is an important writer though an imperfect one. I did go through a
stage when I read a lot of Southern writers: Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty,
Flannery OConnor . . . Any small, claustrophobic, ingrown community
resembles another. The passion and ignorance in the Deep South of America
and the west of Ireland are the same.
INTERVIEWER
This is the opposite of the high society and the aristocratic world of Prousts
Remembrance of Things Past, which has also been a major source of
inspiration to you.
OBRIEN
Prousts influence on me, along with his genius, was his preoccupation with
memory and his obsession with the past. His concentration on even the
simplest detaillike one petal of a flower, or the design on a dinner plate
has unique, manic intensity. Also, when I read his biography by George
Painter I felt the tenderness of his soul and wished I could have met him as a

human being. You see, Joyce and Proust, although very different, broke the
old mold by recognizing the importance of the rambling, disjointed nature of
what goes on in the head, the interior monologue. I wonder how they would
fare now. These are more careless times. Literature is no longer sacred, it is a
business. There is an invisible umbilical cord between the writer and his
potential reader, and I fear that the time has gone when readers could sink
into a book the way they did in the past, for the pace of life is fast and
frenetic. The world is cynical: the dwelling on emotions, the perfection of
style, the intensity of a Flaubert is wasted on modern sensibility. I have a
feeling that there is a dying, if not a death, of great literature. Some blame
the television for it. Perhaps. There is hardly any distinction between a writer
and a journalistindeed, most writers are journalists. Nothing wrong with
journalism any more than with dentistry, but they are worlds apart!
Whenever I read the English Sunday papers I notice that the standard of
literacy is highall very clever and hollowbut no dues to literature. They
care about their own egos. They synopsize the book, tell the plot. Well, fuck
the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative
truth, and the perfection and care with which it has been rendered. After all,
you dont say of a ballet dancer, He jumped in the air, then he twirled
around, et cetera . . . You are just carried away by his dancing. The nicest
readers areand I know by the letters I receiveyoungish people who are
still eager and uncontaminated, who approach a book without hostility. But
when I read Anita Brookners novel Look at Me, I feel I am in the grip of a
most wonderful, imaginative writer. The same is true of Margaret Atwood.
Also, great literature is dying because young people, although they dont talk
about it much, feel and fear a holocaust.
INTERVIEWER
What about your own relationship with critics? Do you feel misunderstood
and neglected by them, or have they been kind to you? Have you ever been
savaged by them?
OBRIEN
Oh yes! I have been savaged all right! I believe one reviewer lost her job on
the New Statesman because her review of my book A Pagan Place was too
personal. She went on and on about my illiterate background. On the whole I
have had more serious consideration in the United States than in Britain or
Ireland. Perhaps because I am not known there as a personality! I do not
despair though, for the real test of writing is not in the reading but in the
rereading. I am not ashamed of my books being reread. The
misunderstanding may be due just to geography, and to race. The Irish and
the English are poles apart in thought and disposition.

INTERVIEWER
It may also be due to a certainand very un-Britishdmesure in your
writing; I mean they find you too sentimental.
OBRIEN
I am glad to say that Dickens was accused of sentimentality and, by God, he
lives on!
INTERVIEWER
You were brought up as a devout Catholic and had a convent education. At
one point you even contemplated becoming a nun. What made you give up
religion?
OBRIEN
I married a divorc, and that was my first Fall. Add to that the hounding
nature of Irish Catholicism and you can dimly understand. We had a daily
admonition which went:
You have but one soul to save
One God to love and serve
One Eternity to prepare for
Death will come soon
Judgement will follow, and then
Heavenor HellFor Ever!
INTERVIEWER
In your novel A Pagan Place, the heroine does become a nun. Was that a
vicarious fulfillment of a subconscious wish?
OBRIEN
Perhaps. I did think of becoming a nun when I was very young, but it went out
of my mind later, chased away by sexual desire!
INTERVIEWER
Another interesting aspect of that novel is that it is written in the secondperson singular, like a soliloquy. It is somewhat reminiscent of Molly Blooms
soliloquy in Ulysses; were you conscious of the influence?

OBRIEN
I didnt take Mollys as a model. The reason was psychological. As a child you
are both your secret self and the you that your parents think you are. So
the use of the second person was a way of combining the two identities. But I
tend not to examine these things too closelythey just happen.
INTERVIEWER
Religion has played such a crucial part in your life and evolution, yet you
have not dealt with it on any philosophical or moral level, as have Graham
Greene or Georges Bernanos; you havent made religion the central theme of
any of your novels. Why?
OBRIEN
That is perhaps one of the differences between men and women who go
through the same experiences. I flee from my persecutors. I have not
confronted religion.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you ever will?
OBRIEN
I hope sowhen I have got rid of the terror and the anxiety. Or perhaps when
I know exactly what I believe or dont believe.
INTERVIEWER
Lets talk about the subjects that are dealt with in your work, its central
themes, which are romantic love and Ireland. Some peopleand not only
feminists!think that your preoccupation with romance verges at times on
the sentimental and the romantic novel formula. You quoted Aragon in
answer: Love is your last chance, there is really nothing else to keep you
there.
OBRIEN
Other people have said it too, even the Beatles! Emily Dickinson wrote, And
is there more than love and death, then tell me its name? But my work is
concerned with loss as much as with love. Loss is every childs theme
because by necessity the child loses its mother and its bearings. And writers,
however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart. So my central
theme is lossloss of love, loss of self, loss of God. I have just finished a play,
my third, which is about my family. In it for the first time I have allowed my
father, who is always the ogre figure in my work, to weep for the loss of his

child. Therefore, I might, if the gods are good to me, find that my
understanding of love has become richer and stronger than my dread of loss.
You see, my own father was what you might call the archetypal Irishmana
gambler, drinker, a man totally unequipped to be a husband or a father. And
of course that colored my views, distorted them, and made me seek out
demons.
INTERVIEWER
Is that why, in nearly all your novels, women are longing to establish a
simple, loving, harmonious relationship with men, but are unable to do so?
OBRIEN
My experience was pretty extreme, so that it is hard for me to imagine
harmony, or even affinity, between men and women. I would need to be
reborn.
INTERVIEWER
The other central theme of your work is Ireland. It seems to me that you have
the same love-hate relationship with Ireland that most exiles have with their
native country: on the one hand an incurable nostalgia and longing, and on
the other the fact that one cannot go back, because the reasons that made
one leave in the first place are still there. There is a constant conflict in the
soul.
OBRIEN
My relationship with Ireland is very complex. I could not live there for a
variety of reasons. I felt oppressed and strangulated from an early age. That
was partly to do with my parents, who were themselves products and victims
of their history and culture. That is to say, alas, they were superstitious,
fanatical, engulfing. At the same time they were bursting with talentI know
this from my mothers letters, as she wrote to me almost every day. So I have
to thank them for a heritage that includes talent, despair, and permanent
fury. When I was a student in Dublin my mother found a book of Sean
OCasey in my suitcase and wanted to burn it! But without reading it! So they
hated literature without knowing it. We know that the effect of our parents is
indelible, because we internalize as a child and it remains inside us forever.
Even when the parents die, you dream of them as if they were still there.
Everything was an occasion for fear, religion was force-fed the way they feed
the geese of Strasbourg for pt! I feel I am a cripple with a craving for
wings. So much for the personal aspect. As for the country itself, it is no
accident that almost all Irish writers leave the country. You know why?
Ireland, as Joyce said, eats her writers the way a sow eats her farrow. He also

called it a warren of prelates and kinechites. Of course theres the beauty of

the landscape, the poetry, the fairy tales, the vividness. I have shown my
love and my entanglement with the place as much as I have shown my
hatred. But they think that I have shown only my hatred.
INTERVIEWER
Is that why they had an auto-da-f of your first novel in your native village?
OBRIEN
It was a humble event, as befits a backward place. Two or three people had
gone to Limerick and bought The Country Girls. The parish priest asked them
to hand in the books, which they did, and he burnt them on the grounds of
the church. Nevertheless, a lot of people read it. My mother was very harsh
about it; she thought I was a disgrace. That is the sadnessit takes you half a
life to get out of the pits of darkness and stupidity. It fills me with anger, and
with pity.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that after all these years and through your books you have
exorcised the demon and can let it rest?
OBRIEN
I hope not, because one needs ones demons to create.
INTERVIEWER
After that small auto-da-f, did anything else of that kind happen?
OBRIEN
They used to ban my books, but now when I go there, people are courteous
to my face, though rather slanderous behind my back. Then again, Ireland
has changed. There are a lot of young people who are irreligious, or less
religious. Ironically, they wouldnt be interested in my early booksthey
would think them gauche. They are aping English and American mores. If I
went to a dance hall in Dublin now I would feel as alien as in a disco in
Oklahoma.
INTERVIEWER
You are not a political writer because, as you say, politics are concerned with
the social and the external, while your preoccupations are with the inner,
psychological life. Nonetheless, considering your emotional involvement with
Ireland, how have you kept away from the situation in Northern Ireland

terrorism, the IRA, et cetera . . .?

OBRIEN
I have written one long piece on Northern Ireland for the German magazine
Stern. My feelings about it are so manifold. I think it is mad, a so-called
religious war, in this day and age. At the same time, I cant bear the rhetoric
of the Unionists; I mean Ireland is one small island, and those six counties do
not belong to Britain. Equally I abhor terrorism, whoever does it, the IRA, the
Arabs, the Israelis. But when I stayed in Northern Ireland to research and
write the article, I realized that the Catholics are second-class citizens. They
live in terrible slums, in poverty, and know no way of improving their
conditions. I have not set a novel in Northern Ireland simply because I do not
know enough about it. I dislike cantyou get that from politicians. Writers
have to dig deep for experience. I might go and live there for a while, in order
to discover and later write about it. But so far I have refrained from bringing
the topic into a book merely as a voyeur.
INTERVIEWER
Lets get back to Virginia Woolf . . . Why and when did she become an
obsession for you? After all, you are very different as writers and as people.
OBRIEN
I first read her critical essays, The Common Reader, and I saw a woman who
loved literature, unlike many critics who just use it. The essays are on Hazlitt,
Wordsworth, Hardy, everyone. I was overwhelmed first by the generosity of
her mind and its perspicacity. Later I read To the Lighthouse and my favorite,
Mrs. Dalloway, which is very spry and sprightly. Then I was asked to write a
play about her and I began to read everything she had writtendiaries,
letters, et cetera . . . I realized that she gave of herself so utterly, so
shamelessly. Her photographs show her as aloof, which she was in some
ways. But in the diaries and letters, she tells everything! If she buys a pair of
gloves she has to commit it to paper. So I came to know her and to love her.
INTERVIEWER
Some critics pointed to the plays neglect of her intellectual vigor and her
bitchiness. Do you think her bitchiness was due to lack of sexual
gratification?
OBRIEN
She did have a bitchy side, but alongside it a childlike need for affection. She
called people pet names, waited for her husband to come home, adored her
sister Vanessa and wanted her approval. I saw Woolf as a troubled, needful

creature. Her bitchiness was diminishing, certainly, and she would have been
a grander figure without it. I selected those parts of her that chart her
dilemma, her march towards suicide. Another writer, say an English
homosexual, could write a very waspish, very witty play about her. I hope
that mine was valid.
INTERVIEWER
Having been successful at novels and short stories, you tried your hand at
dramaplays and screenplays. How did that come about?
OBRIEN
I was asked to adapt my own novel A Pagan Place for the stage and it opened
a new vista for me. Then with some experience I tackled Woolf. Now I have
written a third play, which for the time being is called Home Sweet Home, or
Family Butchers. I feel drama is more direct, more suitable for expressing
passions. Confrontation is the stuff of drama. It happens rather than is
described. The play starts in the early morning, the voice of an Irish tenor
comes over the gramophoneJohn McCormack is singing Bless This House,
Oh Lord We Pray, then hes interrupted by a gunshot followed by another
gunshot. The lights come on, a man and a woman appear, and you know that
this is a play about passion and violence. You go straight for the jugular.
INTERVIEWER
When you start a play, or a novel, or a short story, do you have a basic idea?
Or a sentence? Something that triggers off the process of creating the work?
OBRIEN
I always have the first line. Even with my very first book, The Country Girls, I
went around with this first sentence in my head long before I sat down to
write it.*
INTERVIEWER
Once you have started, do you have the whole scheme in your mind or do
characters and plot take their own course and lead you, as some novelists
say they do? I mean, Balzac was so surprised and moved by Old Goriots
death that he opened his window and shouted, Le Pre Goriot est mort! Le
Pre Goriot est mort!
OBRIEN
I know more or less, but I dont discuss it with myself. It is like sleepwalking; I
dont know exactly where I am going but I know I will get there. When I am
writing, I am so glad to be doing it that whatever form it takesplay, novel,

et ceteraI am thankful to the Fates. I keep dozens of pens by me, and

exercise books.
INTERVIEWER
When success came and you began to be famous and lionized, did it affect
your life, work, and outlook in any way? Is success good for an artist, or does
it limit his field of experience?
OBRIEN
It depends on the degree of success and on the disposition of the artist. It
was very nice for me to be published, as I had longed for it. But my success
has been rather modest. It hasnt been meteoric. Nor was it financially
shatteringjust enough to carry me along.
INTERVIEWER
But you have had a great deal of social success: fame, publicity, so on . . .
OBRIEN
I am not conscious of it. I go to functions more as a duty than for pleasure,
and I am always outside looking in, not the other way round. But I am grateful
to have had enough success not to feel a disasterit has allayed my
hopelessness. Undoubtedly success contributed to the breakup of my
marriage. I had married very young. My husband was an attractive father
figurea Professor Higgins. When my book was published and well received,
it altered things between us. The break would have come anyway, but my
success sped it up. Then began a hard life; but when you are young, you have
boundless energyyou run the house, mind the children, and write your
despair. I dont know if I could do it all now. Looking back I realize that I am
one of the luckiest people in the world, since no matter how down I go
something brings me back. Is it Gods grace or just peasant resilience?
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps it is the creative act of writing. John Updike once said that the minute
he puts an unhappiness down on paper, it metamorphoses into a lump of
sugar!
OBRIEN
I think he was simplifying. The original pain that prompted the writing does
not lessen, but it is gratifying to give it form and shape.
INTERVIEWER

Did money ever act as a spur? You were very prolific in the sixties, and still
are.
OBRIEN
I have never written anything in order to make money. A story comes to me,
is given me, as it were, and I write it. But perhaps the need to earn a living
and my need to write coincided. I know that I would still write if tomorrow I
was given a huge legacy, and I will always be profligate.
INTERVIEWER
How do you organize your time? Do you write regularly, every day? Philip
Roth has said that he writes eight hours a day three hundred and sixty-five
days a year. Do you work as compulsively?
OBRIEN
He is a man, you see. Women have the glorious excuse of having to shop,
cook, clean! When I am working I write in a kind of trance, longhand, in these
several copybooks. I meant to tidy up before you came! I write in the morning
because one is nearer to the unconscious, the source of inspiration. I never
work at night because by then the shackles of the day are around me, what
James Stephens (author of The Crock of Gold) called That flat, dull catalogue
of dreary things that fasten themselves to my wings, and I dont sit down
three hundred and sixty-five days a year because Im not that kind of writer. I
wish I were! Perhaps I dont take myself that seriously. Another reason why I
dont write constantly is that I feel I have written all I had wanted to say
about love and loss and loneliness and being a victim and all that. I have
finished with that territory. And I have not yet embraced another one. It may
be that Im going towards itI hope and pray that this is the case.
INTERVIEWER
When you are writing, are you disciplined? Do you keep regular hours, turn
down invitations, and hibernate?
OBRIEN
Yes, but discipline doesnt come into it. It is what one has to do. The impulse
is stronger than anything. I dont like too much social life anyway. It is gossip
and bad white wine. Its a waste. Writing is like carrying a fetus. I get up in
the morning, have a cup of tea, and come into this room to work. I never go
out to lunch, never, but I stop around one or two and spend the rest of the
afternoon attending to mundane things. In the evening I might read or go out
to a play or a film, or see my sons. Did I tell you that I spend a lot of time
moping? Did Philip Roth say that he moped?

INTERVIEWER
Dont you feel restless and lonely if you have worked all day and have to
spend the evening alone?
OBRIEN
Less lonely than if I were bored at a dinner party. If I get restless I might ring
up one of a handful of friends who are close enough to come to the rescue.
Rilke said, Loneliness is a very good practice for eternity. Loneliness is not
intolerabledepression is.
INTERVIEWER
Before the film script on Joan of Arc that you are writing now, you wrote
another two. One of them, Zee & Co., starring Elizabeth Taylor, was a bigbudget, Hollywood film. How did you enjoy that experience?
OBRIEN
The film world is inhabited by gangsters. I have met many producers and
very few of them could I accuse of being sensitive, or interested in writing.
They are businesspeople whose material is other peoples imagination, and
that invariably leads to trouble. People in the clothing industry or the motor
business are dealing with merchandise, but the producers raw material is
first and foremost the writer. So I cant say that I had a happy experience. But
it is possible; low-budget films like Gregorys Girl or The Country Girls do get
made. I had a marvelous time with the latter; they didnt have four writers all
rewriting my script. It restored my faith. I do believe that cinema and the
television are the media of the future, more than books, simply because
people are too restive. I put as much into a film script as into anything I write
it is, I believe, an art form, and great directors like Bergman, Buuel,
Hitchcock, and Fassbinder have made it so. What happened with Zee & Co.
and what happens generally when you get involved with Hollywoodis that
you give them the script and then the director or leading actress proceeds to
write their own stuff. They are often as capable of writing as I am of brain
surgery! So they just disembowel it. And they do it for two reasons: one is
ego and the other is ignorance. They know nothing about writing and
therefore think they can bring their own ideas to it. Now, in the theater when
actors want something changed they ask the author.
INTERVIEWER
If someone had time to read only one of your books, which one would you
recommend?
OBRIEN

A Pagan Place.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that your best book, the one that every writer aspires to, is yet to
come?
OBRIEN
It had better be! I need to develop, to enlarge my spheres of experience.
INTERVIEWER
When you say you are changing your life, do you also mean that the subject
matter of your fiction will change with it?
OBRIEN
I think so. I am giving a lecture in Boston next month about women in
literature. I had to come to the forlorn conclusion that all the great heroines
have been created by men. I had an anthology of womens writing called Bold
New Women in which the editor, Barbara Alson, very wisely says that all
women writers have written about sex, because sex is their biological life,
their environment, and that for a woman a sexual encounter is not just the
mechanical thing it can be for a man butand she uses this wonderful phrase
a clutch on the universe. I have written quite a lot of love stories; I dont
think I want to write those anymore. I even find them hard to read! It doesnt
mean that I am not interested in love anymorethat goes on as long as there
is breath. I mean I am not going to write about it in the same way.
INTERVIEWER
Could it have something to do with age?
OBRIEN
Bound to have something to do with age. The attitude toward sex changes in
two ways. Sexual love becomes deeper and one realizes how fundamental it
is and how rich. At the same time, one sees that it is a sort of mutual game
and that attraction makes one resort to all sorts of ruses and strategies. To an
outsider it is all patent, even laughable. Shakespeare saw through this
glorious delusion better than anyone and As You Like It is the funniest play
about love, yet it is steeped in love.
INTERVIEWER
What about the new cult of chastity? Germaine Greers new book advocates
restrainta backlash against a decade or so of permissiveness. Have you

been influenced by the changing mood?

OBRIEN
I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the
temptation. I know promiscuity is boring, much more than fish and chips,
which is comforting.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find sex scenes difficult to write, considering your puritanical
background?
OBRIEN
Not really. When you are writing you are not conscious of the reader, so that
you dont feel embarrassed. Im sure Joyce had a most heady and wonderful
time writing the last fifty pages of Ulyssesglorious Molly Bloom. He must
have written it in one bout, thinking: Ill show the women of the world that I
am omniscient!
INTERVIEWER
What do you think the future has in store for literature? You have been very
pessimistic so far. For example, last year nearly three hundred novels were
published in France, and few except the ones that won the big prizes were
read. Will we go on endlessly writing novels with so few making a mark?
OBRIEN
As you know the future itself is perilous. But as regards books, there is first
the financial aspect of publishing. Already books are very expensive, so that a
first novel of quality will have less of a chance of being picked up. Say a new
Djuna Barnes, or indeed Nathalie Sarraute, might not get published. If Woolfs
The Waves were to be published today it would have pitiful sales. Of course,
how-to books, spy stories, thrillers, and science fiction all sell by the
millions. What would be wonderfulwhat we need just nowis some
astonishing fairy tale. I read somewhere the other day that the cavemen did
not paint what they saw, but what they wished they had seen. We need that,
in these lonely, lunatic times.
INTERVIEWER
So if we manage to save the planet, is there hope for literature as well?
OBRIEN
Oh yes! At this very moment, some imagination is spawning something

wonderful that might make us tremble. Lets say there will always be
literature because the imagination is boundless. We just need to care more
for the imagination than for the trivia and the commerce of life. Literature is
the next best thing to God. Joyce would disagree. He would say literature is,
in essence, God.
* I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly.

Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger.

Stephen Spender, The Art of Poetry No. 25

Interviewed by Peter A. Stitt ISSUE 77, WINTER-SPRING 1980
undefined

The strength of Mr. Spenders literary reputation, which is international in

scope, has made him something of a nomad as scholar and poet. His homes
are in St. Johns Wood, London, and Maussanne-les-Alpilles, France, where he
spends his summers; but he is often on the road, giving readings and lectures
and serving as writer in residence at various American universities. This
interview took place in May, 1978, at the end of Mr. Spenders stint as visiting
professor of English at the University of Houston.
Mr. Spenders domicile in Houston was a penthouse apartment atop a highrise dormitory on the university campus. The walls of the apartment are glass
and afforded the poet a 270-degree view of Americas self-proclaimed twentyfirst-century city. His fellow residents in the dorm were mostly athletes, a fact
that especially delighted Mr. Spender at breakfast, for with them he was
served steaks, sausage, ham, eggs, biscuits, and grits.
At the time of the interview, Mr. Spender was busy with several projects;
besides preparing for his imminent departure and saying goodbye to his
many friends, he was completing the text for Henry Moore: Sculptures in
Landscape, which was published in 1978. He had also been invited by the
university to deliver its commencement address, an event that took place on
the afternoon of May 13, just hours after our last taping session. Ive never
even been to a commencement before. What does one say? he had asked. I
suppose I will tell them to read books all their lives and to make a lot of
money and give it to the university.

INTERVIEWER
Id like to begin by asking about some people you may have known. Were you
at all close to William Butler Yeats?
STEPHEN SPENDER
I met Yeats, I think probably in 1935 or 1936, at Lady Ottoline Morrells.
Ottoline asked me to tea alone with Yeats. He was very blind andI dont
know whether he was deaf, but he was very sort of remote, he seemed
tremendously old. He was only about the age I am now, but he seemed
tremendously old and remote. He looked at me and then he said, Young
man, what do you think of the Sayers? I hadnt the faintest idea what he was
talking aboutI thought perhaps he meant Dorothy Sayerss crime stories or
somethingI became flustered. What he meant was a group of young ladies
who chanted poems in chorus. Ottoline got very alarmed and rushed out of
the room and telephoned to Virginia Woolf, who was just around the corner,
and asked her to come save the situation. Virginia arrived in about ten
minutes time, tremendously amused, and Yeats was very pleased to meet
her because hed just been reading The Waves. He also read quite a lot of
scienceI think he read Eddington and Rutherford and all those kinds of
thingsand so he told her that The Waves was a marvelous novel, that it was
entirely up to date in scientific theory because light moved in waves, and
time, and so on. Of course Virginia, who hadnt thought of all this, was terribly
pleased and flattered. And then I remember he started telling her a story in
which he said, And as I went down the stairs there was a marble statue of a
baby and it started talking in Greek to methat sort of thing. Virginia adored
it all, of course.
Ottoline had what she called her Thursday parties, at which you met a lot of
writers. Yeats was often there. He loosened up a great deal if he could tell
malicious stories, and so he talked about George Moore. Yeats particularly
disliked George Moore because of what he wrote in his book Hail and
Farewell, which is in three volumes, and which describes Yeats in a rather
absurd way. Moore thought Yeats looked very much like a black crow or a rook
as he walked by the lake on Lady Gregorys estate at Coole. He also told how
Yeats would spend the whole morning writing five lines of poetry and then
hed be sent up strawberries and cream by Lady Gregory, and so Yeats would
have to get his own back on George Moore. Another thing that amused Yeats
very much for some reason was Robert Graves and the whole saga of his life
with Laura Riding. He told how Laura Riding threw herself out of a window
without breaking her spine, or breaking it but being cured very rapidly. All
that pleased Yeats tremendously.
I remember his telling the story of his trip to Rapallo to show the manuscript

of The Tower to Ezra Pound. He stayed at the hotel and then went around and
left the manuscript in a packet for Pound, accompanied by a letter saying: I
am an old man, this may be the last poetry Ill ever write, it is very different
from my other work?all that kind of thingand: What do you think of it?
Next day he received a postcard from Ezra Pound with one word on it putrid.
Yeats was rather amused by that. Apparently Pound had a tremendous
collection of cats, and Yeats used to say that Pound couldnt possibly be a
nasty man because he fed all the cats of Rapallo. I once asked him how he
came to be a modern poet, and he told me that it took him thirty years to
modernize his style. He said he didnt really like the modern poetry of Eliot
and Pound. He thought it was static, that it didnt have any movement, and
for him poetry had always to have the romantic movement. He said, For me
poetry always means Yet well go no more a-roving / By the light of the
moon. So the problem was how to keep the movement of the Byron lines
but at the same time enlarge it so that it could include the kind of material
that he was interested in, which was to do with everyday lifepolitics,
quarrels between people, sexual love, and not just the frustrated love he had
with Maud Gonne.
INTERVIEWER
I believe you were an early admirer of Dylan Thomas.
SPENDER
I knew Dylan from very early on. In fact, I was the first literary person he met
in London. Edith Sitwell made the absurd claim that shed discovered Dylan
Thomas, which is rubbish. All she did was write a favorable review of his first
book. There was a Sunday newspaper called Reynolds News at that time, and
it had a poetry column which was edited by a man called Victor Neuberg. He
would publish poems sent in by readers. I always read this column, being
very sympathetic with the idea of ordinary people writing poetry. And then in
one issue I saw a poem which I thought was absolutely marvelousit was
about a train going through a valley. I was very moved by this poem, so I
wrote to the writer in care of the column, and the writer wrote back. It was
Dylan Thomas, and in his letter he said first of all that he admired my work,
something that he never said again. Then he said he wanted to come up to
London and that he wanted to make moneyhe was always rather obsessed
by money. So I invited him to London, and may have sent him his fare. I felt
nervous about meeting him alone, which is what I should have done, so I
invited my good friend William Plomer to have lunch with us. We took him to
a restaurant in Soho. He was very pale and intense and nervous, and Plomer
and I talked a lot of London gossip to prevent the meal from going in
complete silence.

I think he probably stayed in Londonhe was a friend of Pamela Hansford

Johnson, who became Lady Snow. Then, right at the end of his life, Dylan
wrote me a letter saying hed never forgotten that I was the first poet of my
generation who met him. He was thanking me for some review Id written
this was the most appreciative review hed had in his life, I think he said,
something like that. Mind you, he probably wrote a dozen letters like that to
people every day. And he certainly said extremely mean things behind my
back, of that Im quite sure. I dont hold that against him at allit was just his
style. We all enjoy doing things like that. After those very early days I didnt
see Dylan often; one reason is that I never get on well with alcoholics. Also he
liked to surround himself with a kind of court that moved from pub to pub.
And Dylan was expected to pay for everyone, which he always did, and he
was expected to be Dylan. Of course when I was at Horizon with Cyril
Connolly, Dylan was always coming in, usually to borrow money. Richard
Burton was funny telling me about Dylan. He was a young actor and
absolutely without money. He would be playing somewhere and Dylan would
turn up to borrow a pound. When he left, Burton would always hear a taxi
carrying the pauper away.
INTERVIEWER
How well did you know Ernest Hemingway?
SPENDER
Hemingway I knew during the Spanish civil war. He often turned up in
Valencia and Madrid and other places where I happened to be. We would go
for walks together, and then hed talk about literature. He was marvelous as
long as he didnt realize that he was talking about literatureI mean hed say
how the opening chapter of Stendhals La Chartreuse de parme was the best
description of war in literature, when Fabrizio gets lost, doesnt know where
he is at all in the Battle of Waterloo. Then Id say, Well, what do you think
about Henry IV, do you think Shakespeare writes well about war? Oh, Ive
never read Shakespeare, hed say, what are you talking about? You seem to
imagine Im a professor or something. I dont read literature, Im not a literary
manthat kind of thing.
He was very nice when one was alone with him, but the public Hemingway
could be troublesome. On one occasion, I remember we went into a bar
where there were girls. Hemingway immediately took up a guitar and started
strumming, being Hemingway. One of the girls standing with him pointed at
me and said, Tu amigo es muy guapoyour friend is very handsome.
Hemingway became absolutely furious, bashed down the guitar and left in a
rage. He was very like that. Another time, my first wife and I met him and
Marty Gellhorn in Paris. They invited us to lunch, someplace where there were

steaks and chips, things like that, but my wife ordered sweetbread. Also she
wouldnt drink. So Hemingway said, Your wife is yellow, thats what she is,
shes yellow. Marty was like that, and do you know what I did? I used to take
her to the morgue in Madrid every morning before breakfast. Well, the
morgue in Madrid before breakfast really must have been something.
Hemingway always said of me, Youre okay. All thats wrong with you is
youre too squeamish. So he would describe modern war. Hed say, If you
think of modern war from the point of view of a pilot, the city that hes
bombing isnt all these people whom you like to worry about, people who are
going to sufferits just a mathematical problem. Its like shading in a circle
with dark areas where you drop your bombs. You mustnt think of it in a
sentimental way at all. At that same meeting in Paris, he told me again I was
squeamish, and then he said, This is something you ought to look at, it will
do you good. He produced a packet of about thirty photographs of the most
horrible murders, which he carried around in his pockets. This toughened one
up in some way. He told me that what motivated him really, while he was in
Spain, wasnt so much enthusiasm about the republic, but to test his own
courage. He said, Only if you actually go into battle and bullets are
screeching all around you, can you know whether youre a coward or not. He
had to prove to himself that he wasnt a coward. And he said, Mind, you shit
in your pants with fear. Everyone does that, but that isnt what counts. I
dont remember quite what it is that countsbut he always wanted to test his
own courage. Physical courage to him was a kind of absolute value.
INTERVIEWER
Given Audens general air of superiority, a quality that seems to come
through over and over, was it possible really to feel close to him as a human
being?
SPENDER
Yes, because there was a kind of nonseriousness about Wystan, a kind of
buffoonery, which undercut the superiority. He wasnt intellectually arrogant.
He was extremely clever and quite demanding, I should say, and he criticized
ones work with authority, but he never had the air of a critic. He really was a
born teacher. He would say, If I were you, I wouldnt put in the word like
here, for instance. Or, That lines marvelous, but the rest is absolute trash.
Hed talk like that, but he wouldnt give you the feeling that he was preaching
at you. Of course I was a bit in awe of him, being two or three years younger
than he was. But still there was a great deal of fun, of playfulness, in all that
he said. In fact his whole relationship with a person like Isherwood seemed
one long farcical dialogue. If youd heard our kind of conversation, it would
probably have seemed quite frivolous. In fact, there always was a strong

strain of frivolity, which one cannot imagine in a conversation, say, between

F. R. Leavis and Mrs. Leavis about literature. He always had a deep-down
desire not to be taken seriously. For instance, after the war, quite late on, he
once gave me a terrific lecture about my behavior and my life. I was quite
impressed by this, and so I said, Oh, you are quite right, Wystan, I think Ill
change my whole life. He buried his head in his hands and said, Please.
What are you talking about? Dont you realize Im not serious? I dont in the
least want you to be any different from what you are. The thing that I cant
bear about America is that everyone always takes me seriously.
There was a constant streak of absurdity about him. I stayed the night with
him once in Greenwich Village, and when I got up in the morning, I naturally
pulled the curtain. Immediately the whole thingcurtains, rods, everything
clattered to the floor. Auden said, Why on earth did you draw the curtain?
And I said, Well, because I wanted the daylight. And he said, I never draw
the curtain, I just always leave it closed. About two weeks later I returned,
and the curtain was still on the floor, exactly where it had fallen. Auden
always had a sort of Beatrix Potter quality to him, a sort of Mrs.
Tickeltedemal. And that he was campI mean it is difficult to think of a
serious critic who is camp, isnt it? Oscar Wilde, for instance, would not give
you a serious lecture on first principles of literary criticism. Youd have to take
yourself so seriously.
Another interesting thing about Auden is he didnt like seeing people in twos
and threes. Hed put up with a party, quite enjoy it, as a kind of ceremony.
But otherwise he liked seeing one alone, and he really resented another
person being introduced into the situation. On one occasion I was to have
dinner with him in Greenwich Village. Well, I ran into an old friend of ours
from Oxford, Rex Warner, so I rang up Auden and asked if I could bring him to
dinner. Auden said, Yes, of course, bring him along. This was about ten
oclock at night, when I rang him, and Auden was probably drunk. Anyhow, he
forgot completely about it, and when I turned up with Rex Warner, he just
looked at him and said, Why are you here? So I said, You invited Rex. No
I didnt. I never invited Rex. I expected you. Then he said, Anyhow theres
nothing for Rex to eat. Theres only enough for Stephen and me. Then he
recovered himself a bit and said, Well, never mind, Ill eat some hamburger
or something. Stephen and you can have the two chops Ive prepared. He
did this in a very ostentatious way. Poor Rex was deeply hurt.
INTERVIEWER
Ive heard Auden could be selfish or miserly in small ways.
SPENDER
An important thing to remember is that most people who are famous have a

kind of public relations side to their character; they are careful to hide certain
things about themselves. But Auden didnt care. For instance, one of the
things he most detested was people taking his cigarettes. On one occasion he
was staying on Ischia when a yacht I was traveling on called there. In the
course of the afternoon that I spent with him, I happened to take one of his
cigarettes. He said, Why dont you have cigarettes of your own? And I said,
As a matter of fact, I would have bought some but I dont have any Italian
moneyI have just English money with me. Well, he said, Id be happy to
change some for you. Give me a pound. Then he looked up the rate of
exchange in the Herald Tribune, and he said, Well, my dear, I am afraid the
pounds doing very badly. I can only give you a hundred lira, but now you can
go downstairs and buy some cigarettes. If you wanted to make up a story to
show the utter stinginess of someone, you could not do better than that. But
then a few months later, Auden was staying with us in the country, in
England. Our daughter at that time was always talking about having a horse.
But we couldnt quite afford it, so Auden said, Well, look, Stephen, what
Lizzie wants most in this world is a horse. Heres fifty pounds towards buying
her one. This was the same person. I dont think it is so odd, what he did.
What is odd is that he made no attempt to conceal the odd quirk of
meanness.
INTERVIEWER
In your new book, you speak of Herbert Read describing Eliot as lacking in
affection for perhaps everyone. Did you find him to be this cold a person?
SPENDER
No. He was extremely discriminating and mannered, I should say, and his life
was very much governed by conventions of behavior. One would never ring
him and say, May I come round and see you? Everything had to be
elaborate and courteous. But I think that he was quite affectionate, in a
rather remote way, towards people. I think probably Herbert Read felt like a
junior partner to Eliot all his life. He seemed to resent the fact that Eliot had a
greater reputation than he did, that people read Eliots poems but not Herbert
Reads. He didnt seem to understand that Eliot was much better than he
was. I was in a rather similar position in regard to Auden, but in my case I did
have a very clear idea that Auden was much better than I, which prevented
me from resenting him. Eliot himself, to some extent, didnt understand his
own reputation and thought of it as a bit unfair. He once told me that he felt
Conrad Aiken had all his own qualities, that he was as serious and as
dedicated, and that all of his life hed felt it an injustice that hed got so much
attention while Conrad Aiken had been so neglected. But I dont think he felt
that about Herbert Read.

I think Eliot was fond of me and of other people, but he was always rather
distant. I mean if one gets on fairly good terms with someone, you
immediately feel that you know them well. There is a kind of break-in period,
after which, instead of just being an acquaintance, you somehow feel that
you know the person completely. Well, Eliot never allowed one to have that
feeling. There was nothing casual in his relationships. Of course, he had
confidantesGeoffrey Faber, who was his closest friend and his partner in
Faber and Faber, probably knew him better than anyone. He certainly knew
more about Eliot and his troubles with his first wife than anyone else did. Yet
it was Geoffrey Faber who drew my attention to a story of Richard
Aldingtons, which is obviously about Eliot. It describes a man who has a
completely spurious reputation but who manipulates it very adroitly. He has a
wife whom he treats with extreme correctitude but without any sort of
warmth or passion; he freezes the relationship between them through his
conventionality and his perfect manners. It is an odious portrait, really; and
Aldington was a man of no talent. The funny thing is that Faber said, If you
really want to understand Eliot, read that storytheres a streak of truth
about that. He said that early on, certainly before Eliots second marriage.
Eliot changed greatly with his second marriage. But of course one has also to
remember that Faber himself was a rather stuffy, correct man with strangely
repressed passions. I think another important thing about Eliot is that he was
one of those people who is always acting himself, his own role, whatever he is
at a given moment. The poet who is a bank clerk, the perfect gentleman, all
that sort of thing. And I think this element of acting was inseparable from the
irony and made other people conscious of the irony.
INTERVIEWER
That sounds like trying to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
SPENDER
Thats it exactly, yes.
INTERVIEWER
Eliot made such a point of the impersonality of poetry, especially of his own
poetry, and yet there seems to be a resemblance between the character of
Eliot and that personality, even neurotic personality, which is projected in
Prufrock, The Waste Land, and some of his other early poems. Do you think
that maybe he was violating his own rule, that actually there is more of his
own personality in those poems than he would let on?
SPENDER
Yes. I think he indicated as much really when he later described The Waste

Land as one mans grouse. But at the same time one has to remember that
nearly all of Eliots early criticism is extremely polemical, and so if he says
that poetry has to be impersonal its because hes thinking of the Georgian
poets, who made a cult of self-expression. They were all wearing their hearts
on their sleeves; their poetry was written to show that you were a poet in
your whole being. When I was young, if you talked to those people about a
poem, theyd say, Oh, yes, the poet is there, the poet is in those lines. A
poem like, say, The Lake Isle of Innisfree is exactly that, really. Its the poet
being The Poet in the poem and the poem being inseparable from the poet
and the reader liking the poem because hes put in contact with the poet. I
think its that view of poetry that Eliot is really reacting against. In fact, what
hes always saying is that a poem ought to be made objectively, with tools
and technique, as a carpenter turns a table leg with a lathe. And of course
when he talks about the impersonality of the poet, if youll remember, he
puts in an escape clause at the end. He says, But, of course, only those who
have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from
these thingswhich is very sly, and shows in a way that he has his tongue in
his cheek.
This also has to do with the international movement towards modernism,
which goes back to the 1890s. In English poetry, this means a strong French
influence through such things as Arthur Symonss book on the symbolists.
From all this comes the idea of the persona or the mask, the idea that the
poet must never be himself in his poetry, but must invent an artificial self,
must be a mysterious person whom other people dont understand. Laforgue
had this idea, and Eliot completely identified with Laforgue. In fact, his
second marriage was held in the same church in London where Laforgue had
been married. For myself, I cant imagine inventing a persona. I think it was
very much something that generation did. Of course, the most elaborate
mask of all is Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. It is elaborate to the point of
confusion, and one wonders whether it doesnt really show a kind of mental
confusion on Pounds part.
INTERVIEWER
You say that Eliot was the most approachable and helpful poet of his
generation to younger poets. Was he helpful to you when you were a younger
poet?
SPENDER
Yes, he was. The letters he wrote to me when he was a young manthey
were the letters of a person with real affection and real concern. He was also
a bit of a taskmaster, saying You ought to discipline yourself, and so on. But
he was always very kind to us, always helpful. Occasionally one got upset

about things the critics wrote about ones work. Eliot always stood by one,
and said, Why do you worry about that? Just ignore them. This work will add
to your reputation. In a rather unobtrusive way, he couldnt have been more
encouraging.
INTERVIEWER
I take it that the editors of Scrutiny were not similarly encouraging.
SPENDER
No, they werent. When I was in the London Fire Service, there was a fellow
fireman who would never really look at me. And then one day he said, Dont
you realize who I am? His name was Peacock. Then he said, Well, Im the
person who wrote that terrible attack on your first book in Scrutiny. And he
said, The reason I did it was because I was instructed by Leavis to do it, and
told exactly what to say. So it was a very different kind of thing. I think that
Eliot might have given us a bit more criticism, as a matter of fact. No one
knows to this day what Eliot really thought about Audens poetry. Well, of
course he admired it, and he published it, but he never really said anything
about it. He was rather mysterious about it.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think Leavis would have that kind of attitude? Was he just the
kind of person who loves to attack young poets?
SPENDER
A great difficulty about criticism is that critics really form their judgments on
the basis of past work, dont they? You may be an extremely good critic of
past work but totally incapable of judging modern or contemporary work. A
critic always feels that his knowledge, which may be vast, and the critical
standards that he has derived from a study of past work, ought to apply. And
so he will only like the kind of work by living writers in which they do apply.
This argument is obviously based on a false logic. One may be an extremely
good judge of art, say, up to 1910, but be incapable of judging later work
because it contains an element that is unprecedented in the art which one is
able to judge. When I was editing Encounter, I once asked Auden whether I
shouldnt write to Leavis and ask him to write a column in which hed be
completely free to say whatever he liked. And Auden said, That would be
extremely irresponsible of you, because, although he is a very good judge of
what he likes, Leavis is quite incapable of judging what he doesnt like. So
youd get good criticism of the things that he liked and then youd get savage
attacks on things that dont happen to come within his conspectus.
INTERVIEWER

You mentioned your critic, Mr. Peacock of the fire service. Did you not know
who he was because youd never met him before or because you hadnt paid
any particular attention to his attack on your work?
SPENDER
No, Id been very upset by it. I think one has to remember that attacking
writers, especially when they are young, may be extremely damaging to
them. I myself was very discouraged by the attacks of Scrutiny and other
things like that. Of course it is difficult to decide, because on the other hand I
think that criticism has to be centered, you have to have standards, dont
you? My own experience of criticism is that of course one sometimes attacks
something because one thinks the work criticized may be very bad. But
theres always an element of pleasure in doing this. I think an attack is never
really objective. What you say may be objective, your standards may be
objective, but there is actually a kind of pleasure nevertheless, which is a
strongly subjective element. Of course critics pretend that this isnt so, but I
think it is so, and it is very difficult for a critic to resist that.
INTERVIEWER
Doing frank reviews, and especially having negative things to say about
people who were your friendsdid that ever cause you trouble? Did you ever
find that a difficult thing to do?
SPENDER
Well, it probably annoyed them on occasion, but my friends always behaved
very nicely to me; they never held it against me and very rarely showed their
annoyance. Auden himself had total self-confidence, of course. He just
thought that he was cleverer than anyone else, but without arrogance, really,
just out of his own judgment, which may or may not have been right, but
which nevertheless was never arrogant. He knew exactly what he was doing,
and he was totally indifferent to what anyone said about it. And then being a
psychoanalyst helped him a great deal. For instance, when he was so
attacked by Randall Jarrell in 1947 or so, he said, He must be in love with
me; I cant think of any other explanation. Well, that isnt what one usually
thinks about being attacked in print. He was genuinely puzzled. He didnt
think it was a damaging attack in any way.
INTERVIEWER
You have been an editor yourself, especially well-known for your years at
Encounter, from which you resigned in some heat.
SPENDER

Encounter was supported by an organization called the Congress for Cultural

Freedom, which was funded by about forty different foundations. Irving Kristol
and I were the first editors of the magazine, then Irving went back to America
and I stayed on with another American editor. In 1968, with all the exposure
about the CIA, it was revealed that these foundations were simply channeling
money for the CIA. So the two English editors, Frank Kermode and I, we both
resigned. Encounter was a good magazine, and we editors had a free hand
with what we published. So lots of people used to ask, What was wrong with
the CIA connection? What was wrong with it was that we ought to have
known.
INTERVIEWER
To get back to the people that youve known, did you have much contact with
Ezra Pound?
SPENDER
In around 1936, I was in Rapallo, so I wrote to Pound saying I wanted to come
and see him, but I never got any reply. There may have been hundreds of
reasons for thatprobably it was because he thought I was a hopeless case
of leftism and he didnt like my poetry anyhow. But I saw him when he was in
St. Elizabeths Hospital, and he was then always extremely friendly. Then I
used to see him every year for some years at the Spoleto Festival. He
recognized in Gian Carlo Menotti a person who really patronized the arts in a
quite sacrificial way. He practically never said anything, but on one occasion
did say something that moved me very much. About five or seven poets, two
of whom were Ezra and myself, all read their poems, and at the end of the
reading, as we moved off the platform, Ezra Pound took my arm and said,
Why do you and I do this? We realize its all vanity and useless. Then he
said, Oh, for a touch of real sincerity. I was rather touched that he said that
to me.
INTERVIEWER
But of the Pound who directed the course of modern poetry for so many
years, or supposedly did, you did not see that side of Pound?
SPENDER
No. I think Pound had very little influence on the English poets of my
generation. He did not mean much to Auden, I know. Auden really just
couldnt be bothered with The Cantos, I think. Ive grown to admire Pound,
but only in patches. Ive been reading The Cantos again recently, and to me
they are unrelated lyric poems of very great beautymarvelous language
and also this marvelous feeling for light in the Mediterranean. I think what

does come through is his wonderful reverence for civilizationMediterranean

civilization. I once asked him about The Cantos. I said, Will there be a
complete edition of The Cantos? This was in the 1950s. And he said, Forget
about them, just forget about them.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think he was turning his back on them?
SPENDER
I think that Pound, when he became silent, was undergoing some kind of
remorse, and I think he probably felt that his whole political career and his
arrogance had been a terrible mistake. Perhaps as a result of that he
condemned everything that he wrote during that period. Thats a possible
explanation. Of course it may have been a result of mental illness. And it may
have been both.
INTERVIEWER
I want to ask you about the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Do you think
that there is possibly an incredible level of navet in their politics, as though
for them politics was a game or a symbolic or even aesthetic activity, in
which they ignored the realities of fascism?
SPENDER
Yes. I think you might call their politics the politics of civilization, or of their
concept of civilization. They connected the idea of civilization with the idea of
tradition. The logic of this position, which is a cultural position, is that, if
challenged, you have to extend it into politics. If you extend it into politics,
the only people whom you can admire are the reactionaries. It is very much
this way with T. S. Eliot. His attitude towards the external world of society
originally was taken from Baudelaire. What he got from Baudelaire was a
hatred of the idea of progress and industrialization and a hatred of the
materialism of middle-class society. Baudelaire was also a classicist writing in
a modern idiomwriting the poetry of the city in the language of Racine. So
in these respects, Baudelaire was the model for Eliot, who in any case looked
very largely to France for his view of civilization and politics.
So when Eliot, Yeats, and Pound looked around in the contemporary world for
leaders to admire, they found such guardians of the tradition as Mussolini,
Franco, and General ODuffy. But from our point of view, it wasnt serious. I
think we would have felt antagonistic to the politics of Eliot and Pound and
Yeats if wed regarded them seriously as fascists, but we couldnt do so, even
today, although Pound, in particular, considerably incriminated himself by
supporting Mussolini and being very anti-Semitic. But we admired these

writers so much as writers. And even from the cultural point of view, one
could admire their attitude. It was simply the extension of it into political
action that we didnt agree with. One thing we used to discuss in the 1930s
was whether a fascist could be a good writer. We always decided that he
couldnt because fascism was stupid and inhuman. So by definition a person
who was a good writer might call himself a fascist, but couldnt really be one.
INTERVIEWER
Didnt you also later decide that a programmatic communist could not be a
good writer?
SPENDER
Yes. In the early days, though, before the nature of Stalinism became
apparent, there was a lot we admired about Soviet art. We admired Soviet
movies extremely, and I think they had a great influence on my work,
perhaps also on Isherwoods work. Christopher Isherwood and I used to study
the Berlin newspapers to see what Russian movies there were, and wed
always go and see them. Their imagery, using industrial machinery as a kind
of poetic symbolism, like the tractor, the railway engine, factory chimneys,
that kind of thing, to us was rather heroic.
The language used by the government itself, on the other hand, was so
consistently stilted. A friend of mine in the Spanish civil war, a communist in
the international brigade, used to laugh about the communists for their
hackneyed propaganda. He said that on one occasion someone got up at a
meeting and said, Comrades, lets send a spontaneous telegram to Stalin.
INTERVIEWER
With respect to communist literature and the rather hard words you have had
for some of it, would you revise this at all in view of more contemporary
writers like Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, and perhaps even Pablo Neruda?
SPENDER
Well, I cannot really consider Pablo Neruda a communist at all. His kind of
communism was almost entirely rhetorical; he was a sort of highly privileged
propagandist. He was banqueted all the time by the Russians, was given all
sorts of awards in Russia, and so on. I refused to review his autobiography
because he treats all this so casually. As for the others, Ive never been able
to admire Yevtushenko. I consider him to be an operator. On the other hand, it
may be that, in a devious way, he is working for greater freedom in Russia. Of
course, the same applies to Voznesensky, whom I prefer to Yevtushenko, but
Im not a Russian scholar. Then there is Joseph Brodsky, whom Im very fond
of and admire greatly. He holds extreme anti-Soviet views, which I would hold

if I were in his position. I think it is a tragedy that the Russian defectors turn
out to be so anti-communist that they consider the Western anti-communists
as comparative weaklings.
INTERVIEWER
As a poet with a passionate interest in world politics, does it seem to you that
poetry can have any real effect on society or its direction?
SPENDER
I think only in certain situations. For instance, always at the beginning of a
war there is a demand from editors that poets should write war poetry. This
comes from a recognition that, in a situation in which patriotic feelings are
required, poetry may stimulate those feelings. I imagine the sonnets of
Rupert Brooke at the beginning of the First World War probably did make
some people join up to fight the Germans. During the Spanish civil war, the
poetry that was written probably helped the international brigade. Then in a
much wider sense poetry can be politically effective as well. Surely one can
trace the sources of the movement for Italian unity to the fact that Dante
decided to write The Divine Comedy in idiomatic Italian and not in Latin,
which would have been the correct thing for him to have done. And Goethe,
who created, really all by himself, modern German literature, also contributed
greatly to the idea of German unity through doing this. He created a German
culture and taught Germans that they could respect themselves in relation to
France, especially, and other countries.
But I think it is wrong to believe that poetry is really very effective in politics.
And politics can certainly be very bad for poetry. I was discussing this with
Denise Levertov when she was here. She read a political poem, which was
based on her visiting Hanoi and being taken round by the North Vietnamese
to see damage done to hospitals by American aircraft. Of course she had
extremely strong feelings about this, and I dont want to call it just a
propaganda operation on the part of the North Vietnamese, but somehow to
enter almost as a tourist into that kind of suffering and to make propaganda
out of it is not what a poet should be doing. For a journalist its all right, but a
poet has to go in for an act of the imagination, which is on a deeper level. I
mean, if you penetrate to the depths of the suffering, you see that it is not
just inflicted by one side; its something that human beings do to one
another. Also if you write what one has to call propaganda poetry, you lay
yourself open to a kind of argument, which is all right in politics but which
oughtnt to occur in poetry. Someone will say, Well, if the North Vietnamese
had had airplanes, theyd have done the same thing, which you cant really
dispute. I dont think that poets ought to get themselves into that kind of
argument.

There are, of course, political situations so absolutely unspeakable that they

become quite literally unimaginable. It would be impertinent, for example, to
imagine what was happening in the concentration camps during the 1930s
and 1940s. The only way to know that suffering was to be a part of it, but if
you became a part of it, you were destroyed. As a matter of fact, at the end
of the concentration-camp era, when various poets, particularly in Poland,
emerged from the camps, they hated poetry. They regarded poetry as the
greatest betrayal because it always in some way offers pleasure. It would
therefore have to extract some kind of comfort, something pleasurable, from
all these horrors. And so they started writing what they called anti-poetry.
INTERVIEWER
What about the effect of war on poets who were not as closely involved?
SPENDER
In some ways war is a suspension of every other activity that makes life
interesting, like art and conversation. Also, war is a kind of dictatorship, one
cannot say certain things. On the other hand, though, in London during the
war there was a blackout; one saw the stars, and all that was very charming.
Some of the descriptions that came out of the war had a sort of surrealist
effect. One felt during the war that surrealism had come true.
INTERVIEWER
To turn to another subject, there was, in the 1920s, an intense migration of
American writers to Europe. Then, in the 1940s and later, we find many
English writersAuden, Isherwood, Gunn, yourselfmigrating from England
to America. How does one account for this?
SPENDER
Well, I think in a Marxist way one ought to say that both migrations had some
economic basis. The Americans went in large numbers because they could
live very cheaply in Europe in the 1920s. Because of the tremendous inflation
in France, the American writers could eat French food, enjoy French
mistresses, and absorb French civilization at a very low price. Then for those
of us who have come this way across the Atlantic, there again is a very strong
economic reason. And that is that, for just being what we are, being poets
and doing a little teaching and lecturing, we can make a living in America. In
fact, we are rather handsomely rewarded in America. This simply did not
happen before the war in England, where youd be rather surprised to get
even ten dollars for giving a lecture or reading. Today you get up to a
hundred dollars for giving a reading, simply because the whole thing is
subsidized by the arts council. That is one reason. Another is the excitement

of America, the pleasure of finding oneself with American colleagues. I think

Ive talked much more about poetry and about things I care for with American
colleagues than I ever have with English oneswhole generations of them.
America is, among the poets, a place where everything is openly discussed,
and its really immensely more interesting than the scene in England.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a greater serious audience for poetry in America than in England?
SPENDER
The United States, when it takes it seriously, takes it deadly seriously. In
England, on the other hand, no one would expect it to be taken seriously. An
English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An
American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then
he has a deep sense of grievance, because he may only be appreciated by
two thousand people.
One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years
ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets
were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he
was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.
INTERVIEWER
Did you know Robert Frost?
SPENDER
I met him only two or three times. He had a number of sides to his nature, as
we know, including a very black one. He showed me his vain side. I had to
give a dinner party for him, and had someone bellow in his ear the names of
all the other people and had all their place names written out very large so he
could see them at the table. He sat next to E. M. Forster, and asked, And
what magazine do you write for? He just didnt take these people seriously,
and didnt bother to find out who they were.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that there is a strong American influence in the work of Ted
Hughes, but also that there is a good deal of Englishness about his work. Im
not, in asking this question, particularly interested just in Hughess work, but
rather in the terms, the qualities you are talking about. What characteristics
do you have in mind when you speak of American and English qualities in
poetry?
SPENDER

The American to me would be the kind of turned-on, confessional aspect of

Hughes, the violence, really. The English would be that he is still very much a
nature poet. He lives in Devonshire and writes poetry about the countryside,
very beautiful I think, which I consider to be a very English kind of thing. Of
course American poets write nature poetry, but not in the same way. English
nature poetry has a more rooted quality, more the feeling that the poet lives
in this landscape, has always lived in this landscape. But in quite a lot of
recent American poetry about nature, say Gary Snyders, you feel that he has
only just arrived with his knapsack and tent. I suppose that Frost was much
more like an English poet in this respect, and maybe this is why he was first
published in England and was so very much admired in England.
INTERVIEWER
It has been said that, over the last twenty or thirty years, American poetry
has been more lively than British poetry. What do you think of this
hypothesis?
SPENDER
Well, theres been a great deal more of it. As material I should think it is more
interesting to read, but that might be true of journalism also. On the whole,
America since 1950 or so has been the place where things happen. America
has, in the twentieth century, very much the role England had in the
nineteenth. England in the nineteenth century was where the consequences
of the industrial revolution were most acutely felt. Therefore all English
literature of the nineteenth century, including poetry, contains a great deal of
news about the problems of living with child labor and the destruction of the
landscape and that kind of thing. This is essentially what you find in American
poetry of this centurythings like reacting to pollution and trying to heat up
personal values through confession or drugs or any kind of stimulus in order
to compete with the depersonalization caused by the industrial society. Of
course it is interesting and exciting. I think as a matter of fact that some of
the best English poets, particularly Philip Larkin, are making a virtue of the
unexcitingness of England, insisting on the quietness of England.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of Larkin, you have written of the insular type of English poetry,
citing Betjeman and Larkin as examples, a type of poetry that Donald Davie
speaks of in his book on the Hardy tradition. Youve also said that you
yourself are not of this type. How would you characterize yourself, your own
work?
SPENDER

I think Im internationalIve always thought that I was. When I was young,

the feeling for Englishness, for being English, was so strong that I inevitably
felt like a foreigner. Im one-quarter German-Jewish, a quarter German, and
half-English. In America this wouldnt mean anything, but in the England of
the upper classes and middle classes when I grew up, before the 1930s, this
made me feel like a foreigner. I was always very conscious of Englishness, as
though it were something very beautiful, worthy of ones strongest
admiration, but just a little apart from myself. I always felt twice as much
alive the moment I left England. The excitement of just waking up in the
morning and thinking, This is foreign, Im abroad, has always been very
stimulating. I think thats why Ive always been going abroad, getting away
from England.
INTERVIEWER
Early in your life, Auden told you, apparently at Oxford, that you were
essentially an autobiographer, as a writer. This is something that you have
mentioned periodically throughout your career, accepting the
characterization. I think that most readers, looking at your career, recognizing
the many prose works that you have written, would still say that poetry is at
the center of your achievement and is what holds it all together. What do you
think of this; is it poetry or is it autobiography that lies at the heart of your
career?
SPENDER
I dont at all regret having written autobiography, and hope to write more of it
one day. What I do regret is that Ive spent so much time writing criticism
rather than writing more creative works. I am quite well qualified as a critic,
and I suppose I have quite a lot of critical sensibility. I also have a rather
inventive mind, and I keep on thinking of fascinating ideas for books. I ought
to think them up for other people to write rather than me. Love-Hate
Relations is a good example of this. Its a very good idea for a book, but,
because I didnt really have the time to read all the matter, I found it a
tremendous chore after having started it. Someone else could have done it so
much more easily than I, and without sacrificing other work. What I really do
reproach myself for is that I ever wrote a successful critical work as a young
man; The Destructive Element was published when I was twenty-six, in 1935.
I wish it had been so bad that Id have had to stop, but it was sort of halfgood and rather helped me along. Really, it all came from accepting
advances. Publishers will offer you advances for a book of that kind, but not
for other kinds of books. So what I really think is that I ought to have written
novels, plays, stories, poems, anything that was creative. Writing
autobiography is rather inhibiting in two ways. First of all, you are writing
about yourself, and Ive always felt the egotism is indecent, even though I

have such quantities of it. I cant bear to read aloud poems of mine that are
very autobiographicalsome of them I think are my best poems, but I just
cant read them aloud to an audience. And secondly, of course,
autobiography tends to be self-consuming and repetitious. An
autobiographical writer is constantly using up his material, or he is constantly
wanting to use the same material again. The same anecdote will fit into thirty
or forty different pieces, you see.
As regards poetry, Im feeling very self-critical at this stage in my life. I feel
that I understand my work much better than I did and my whole life much
better than I did. I think that a lot of my poetry was spoiled by my not
knowing how to write my own kind of poem. I think that I only really grasp it
now. For instance, I recently looked again at a poem of mine called The
Marginal Field. It is about the theory of economics that describes something
called the margin of profit. There is a field somewhere, say, where it is just
worth sowing corn because, although it is terribly stony and unproductive,
you can just make a profit out of it. Somehow there are certain ideas in
economics, and even in politics, that are true as economics but also true as
poetic metaphors. So I wrote this poem, which is really quite beautiful in
theory, in which I describe a field at the edge of cliffs. The person who is
tilling it is sheeted in sweat and thinking about another field, which is very
profitable, where the corn is waving and golden. Now looking at that poem, I
thought, Oh, I must write that poem. Its as though it wasnt written at all; I
think perhaps I can still write that poem. The reason I couldnt write it then is
because I was unable to draw a clear enough distinction between the
abstract part of the poem and the imagistic richness of the poem. I just didnt
know how to work at it really. I have always worked rather hard at my poems,
and I feel now that I know how to work. I feel that if Id written much more
poetry without worrying whether it was good or bad, and been prepared to
make many more mistakes, Id have been much better off in the end. But Ive
always felt terribly sensitive to criticism, and Ive suffered agonies from
critical remarks. Ive always felt that perhaps its true, I oughtnt to do this,
Im not a poet. And that can be really inhibiting. Theres a marvelous remark
in The Pisan Cantos, where Pound, in his mood of contrition, talks about his
arrogance, his pride, saying Pull down thy vanity. But then he immediately
answers himself with the opposite opinion, which says that if you accept a
negative evaluation of yourself, then you will never accomplish anything:
Here error is all in the not done, / all in the diffidence that faltered . . . I felt
tremendously the force of those lines when I first read them, and have had
them in my mind ever since.
INTERVIEWER
You have said of many poets that you had the sense when you read their
work, poets who were dead, at the end of their careers, that they hadnt

started yet. Is this in the back of your mind as you talk about your own
career?
SPENDER
Yes. I want to do another autobiography, revise World Within World and make
it about twice as long. Thats an important aim I have. And I want to do this
play. Then Id like to do a proper volume of collected poems, and write many
more poems. Thats about it. It would be nice just to have about three books
that were really worthwhile.
INTERVIEWER
Robert Lowell, in a review of Stanley Kunitzs book The Testing-Tree, spoke of
the movement toward a more relaxed, more open, less formal verse as the
drift of our age. Do you feel that your work has evolved in this direction?
SPENDER
No, not at all. And if it is the drift of our age, then I am in favor of going
against the age. I have a strong feeling that the interesting new poet would
be formal and even artificial, someone who would push language always to
the point where it has the fascination of artifice and is not just
straightforward. If Lowell hadnt believed that, he probably would have
written much better poetry in the last twenty years of his life. I think he
suffered from a compulsion rather like Picasso toward the end of his life, to
overproduce simply to prove to himself that he was the greatest poet
producing the greatest quantity of poetry. I think he produced much of his
best poetry when he was under pressure of his illness. But in later years he
was getting drugs that kept him sort of half-ill, half-well the whole time, and
so his poetry came to lack pressure. Then he should have written less and
concentrated more on just a few poems. Some of his later poems are very
good, but many are not, and someone is going to have to make a careful
selection. He was one of the most distinguished and interesting poets of his
time. However lax he became, there was still his tone of voice; you always
hear him speaking, and this is exactly what lacks in the people who criticize
him. A distinctive tone of voice is one of the rarest things in poetry; I think it
is what makes the great poet.
INTERVIEWER
Many writers of your generation are now gone. John Berryman used to speak
in his romantic way about being a lone survivor. How do you feel about
being, in a sense, the survivor of your generation?
SPENDER

I feel that I ought to do my best as representative of my generation. I have

even thought that I oughtnt to write anything that is a waste of the readers
time anymore. I often feel, in a mysterious way, that I am showing my work
to members of my generation, writing it for them, particularly Auden,
because I was closest to him. Perhaps I might just say something about the
writers I am usually classified with. Cecil Day-Lewis I liked very much, though
I never quite understood why he wrote the kind of poetry he did. It always
seemed to me that he was over-literary in some way, that he was somehow
turning his experiences into literature as he lived them, long before actually
writing about them.
Louis MacNeice was tremendously gifted, I think, a most marvelously gifted
technician. I think its significant that one of his best works is his translation
of Faust. It is a marvelous English poem, very close to Goethe in language
and even in its shifts of meter, which is miraculous considering he didnt
know German. He did the translation with a friend who did know German. Ive
always thought that MacNeice had limitations of temperament. He sometimes
seems to be writing a jazzy, crazy kind of poetry, but when you look closer
you realize that its always perfectly controlled. Inside MacNeice there was
always an academic scholar pulling in the rein. He was actually a very
reticent man. In his autobiography, he reveals that his mother went mad
when he was very young, and I think that the effect of this was to repress his
emotional life and to make him avoid at all costs the confessional.
Auden seemed the man of very real genius, very great talent. It is curious
that, when we were at Oxford together, he knew almost nothing about form,
so the poems he wrote then are really free verse. I remember him once
showing me a poem that he said was a sonnet. I asked him why he called it a
sonnet, and he said, Because it only has eleven lines. Then he suddenly
began to study form, to the point where he became a virtuoso. I think his
mastery of form is what allowed him to incorporate ideology, his ideas, into
his poetry so that he eventually became an intellectual, meditative poet. He
was very conscious of his own mental superiority. Once I happened to remark
to Auden how, when one is a child, one somehow establishes ones position in
relation to the other children by knowing whether they are cleverer than you
or not. Auden looked at me in an odd way and said, I always knew that I was
brighter than anyone else. I think he did always know that, and it affected
him greatly. I think that my relationship to him was very much that of a less
clever younger brother. I had two elder brothers who have died. One was a
scientist, an incredibly competent person who knew all about machinery,
engineering, that kind of thing. As long as he was alive I couldnt do anything,
I couldnt even drive a car. And in some funny way, the death of Auden has
seemed a release to me. I never resented being overshadowed by Auden, but
at the same time I think it held me back. Auden was also very preoccupying.

When he went back to live in England, we saw a great deal of him, and if you
saw Auden it was difficult to do anything else. He was rather temperamental
and required quite a lot of attention, demanded great punctuality at meals,
that kind of thing. So if Auden announced he was going to come and stay for
three weeks, although I was delighted because it was nice to have him there,
I also knew that I wouldnt be able to work for three weeks. He had that sort
of effect on meon everyone, in fact.
INTERVIEWER
There is a generation of American poets who seemed to feel that it was
necessary to be unhappy to write poetry, to be alcoholic and even suicidal.
How do you feel about that?
SPENDER
I should have said really quite the opposite. I think its almost a duty to be
happy. Unhappiness is something one can absolutely count on; one is bound
to have a great many worries and one is bound to be very conscious of other
peoples unhappiness. To me it seems important to realize that other peoples
unhappiness is probably greater than ones own, that theres a scale of
unhappiness in the world. To me it is the attitude of a very spoiled person
even to say, Im unhappy. It seems really astonishing, in the age in which
thereve been concentration camps and seven million people asphyxiated,
that people can seek unhappiness. Also I do see very much the point of Yeats.
That if youre writing a tragic poetry, the unhappier it is, the more energetic
and the more vitalizing you must make the language. You dont want to make
the reader identify with your own unhappiness, but to make him enjoy the
depiction of unhappiness in some way, perhaps to make it cathartic. I think
this is one of the profoundest things in Yeats. It led him to rather brutal
utterances sometimes, but I think that when you apply this, say, to
Shakespeare, to Lear, it throws real light on the fact that one very much
enjoys King Lears misery. And the more miserable Lear is, the more
magnificent the language, and the more enjoyable.
INTERVIEWER
Could you say something about the process of writing a poem? What comes
first? A line? The intellectual concept?
SPENDER
Often, a very vivid memory, usually visual, that suggests that it could be
realized in concentrated written language, in a form that is adumbrated
dimly, not yet clear . . . to be discovered. Above all, the feeling that the poem
is thereif only I can release it. When I write a poem I do not know

consciously how it will develop, but I feel I know this unconsciously. Writing is
the gradual revelation of a wholeness already felt when one has the idea for
the poem.
INTERVIEWER
Can you give an example of this?
SPENDER
Well, there are two theories of inspiration. One idea is that poetry can
actually be dictated to you, like it was to William Blake. You are in a
hallucinated state, and you hear a voice or you are in communication with
something outside, like James Merrills poetry, which he says is sometimes
dictated through the Ouija board by Auden and other people.
The other idea is Paul Valrys, what he calls une ligne donne, that you are
given one line and you try to follow up this clue, pulling the whole poem out
of it. My own experience is that a rhythm or something comes into my head,
which I feel I must do, I must write it, create it.
For example, I recall looking out of a railway window and seeing an industrial
landscape, factories, slag heaps, and the line coming into my head, A
language of flesh and roses. The thought at the back of this was that the
industrial landscape was a language, what people have made out of nature,
the contrast of nature and the industrial, A language of flesh and roses. The
problem of the poem was to work this connection out, trying to go back to
remember what you really thought at that instant, and trying to recreate it. If
I think of a poem, I may spend six months writing, but what I am really trying
to do is remember what I thought of at that instant.
INTERVIEWER
Can you finish a poem in a burst? Or is revising a large part of the creative
process?
SPENDER
Occasionally, I can write a poem straight off. Usually I revise a great deala
hundred or more rewritings. One good remark Virginia Woolf makes
somewhere in her journals is that too much rewriting is symptomatic of a
failure of imagination. Mea culpa. But if you put a poem aside, when you look
at it again it tends to rewrite itself, because your remembered intention
criticizes the failures of expression.
INTERVIEWER
What are the disciplines necessary to keep working on a poem for an

extended period of time?

SPENDER
The poet Walter de la Mare said that if there is a leak of attention when you
are trying to concentrate, the leak can be stifled by smoking a cigarette, or in
Schillers case, by inhaling the rotten apples that he kept in a drawer.
INTERVIEWER
Is a poem ever truly completed? Can you read over what youve done without
wanting to worry it some more?
SPENDER
If poems have been anthologized a lot, I feel they probably should not be
touchedthey do not belong to me. Other poems I want to change if I feel
that things in them are a false or incompletely expressed memory of what I
intended to write. A poem may, if one is happy with it, lay a ghost to rest by
ones expressing objectively something that one needs to express
subjectively.
INTERVIEWER
What do you make of Virginia Woolfs somewhat peremptory insistence that
one should not publish before the age of thirty?
SPENDER
I think all she meant was that she hadnt published before she was thirty, so
she didnt think anyone else should do so.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if you could say what the most common faults of experienced poets
might be?
SPENDER
The most common fault of experienced poets is that they acquire facility,
which reduces tension in their art. Tension usually comes from the sense of
difficultythat the poet has to struggle with language and form.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have to bother with any rituals?
SPENDER

The only important ritual for me is to write in such a way that I shut out all
consciousness of my public. Journalism is for the public; poetry is a kind of
secret vice. If someone asks me what I am writing, I hate to say, a poem.
INTERVIEWER
Robert Lowell once said that it is harder to be a good man than a great poet.
He seemed to feel that there is something about being a poet that makes
leading a normal life unusually difficult. What do you think of this notion?
SPENDER
Well, it is hard to be a good man, of course, and a poet is perhaps especially
conscious of this. The great poet or writer is faced by the dilemma that in
order to accomplish his art he must be a selfish person. Think how James
Joyce, for instance, sacrificed his family. The poet may feel he is justified in
doing something because his art demands it. On the whole, artists take this
attitude, and perhaps this attitude is right. You feel, perhaps, that you must
fall in love, and if other people suffer for it, well, it is justified by your poetry.
So the artist says something quite arrogantly, which the ordinary man
probably would not say. I dont think even an automobile manufacturer would
say, I must be unfaithful to my wife for the good of General Motors,
whereas a poet is a person who does say that kind of thing. A poet like Lowell
is conscious of this dilemma. He may have felt that his imagination offered
him a choicehe could have been a good man, in which case he may not
have written poetry. But he chose to write poetry, and seems to have felt he
had to justify doing things that he probably wouldnt morally have approved
in people who werent poets. Lowell caused quite a lot of suffering to other
people, and he was a good man. His poetry is really just one long justification
for the pattern of his life. At the same time, he was really very self-aware; he
was a good and kind and generous man, who never turned on his attackers,
who never said anything mean, except in gossip and amusement, about
anyone. A particularly good man, I would say.
INTERVIEWER
I see that our time is about up. Is there anything we havent covered that you
would particularly like to say?
SPENDER
I have recently been amused and taken by surprise several times at my
poetry readings. For instance, a woman in Dallas asked me, Mr. Spender,
how will your gossamer dreams help to save the world? And on another
occasion, a man asked, How many movies have been made of your poems?
Alas, thereve been none, none at all.

Author photograph by Gerard Malanga.

Interviewed by Antonio Weiss ISSUE 118, SPRING 1991

undefined

Recently, Harold Bloom has been under attack not just in scholarly journals
and colloquia, but also in newspapers, on the op-ed page, on television and
radio. The barrage is due to the best-seller The Book of J, in which Bloom
argues that the J-Writer, the putative first author of the Hebrew Bible, not only
existed (a matter under debate among Bible historians for the last century)
but, quite specifically, was a woman who belonged to the Solomonic elite and
wrote during the reign of Rehoboam of Judah in competition with the Court
Historian. The attacks have come from Bible scholars, rabbis, and journalists,
as well as from the usual academic sources, and Bloom has never been more
isolated in his views or more secure in them. He has become, by his own
description, a tired, sad, humane old creature, who greets his many friends
and detractors with an endearing, melancholy exuberance.
He is happy to talk about most anythingpolitics, romance, sportsalthough
he admits he is too used to some topics to get into them. One sets out to
disagree with him, and the response is, Oh, no, no, my dear . . . In a class
on Shakespeare, a mod-dressed graduate student suggests that Iago may be
sexually jealous of Othello; Bloom tilts his furry eyebrows, his stockinged feet
crossed underneath him, his hand tucked in his shirt, and cries out, That will
not do, my dear. I must protest! Not surprisingly, it is by now a
commonplace of former students articles and lectures to start off with a
quarrel with Bloom, and in his view, this is only as it should be. He likes to
quote the Emersonian adage: That which I can gain from another is never
tuition but only provocation.
The interview was conducted at the homes he shares with his wife, Jeanne, in
New Haven and New Yorkthe one filled with four decades accrual of
furniture and books, the other nearly bare, although stacks of works in
progress and students papers are strewn about in both. If the conversation is
not too heavy, Bloom likes to have music on, sometimes Baroque, sometimes
jazz. (His New York apartment, which is in Greenwich Village, allows him to
take in more live jazz.) The phone rings nonstop. Friends, former students,
colleagues drop by. Talk is punctuated by strange exclamatories: Zoombah,
for oneSwahili for libidois an all-purpose flavoring particle, with the

accompanying, adjectival zoombinatious and the verb to zoombinate. Bloom

speaks as if the sentences came to him off a printed page, grammatically
complex, at times tangled. But they are delivered with great animation,
whether ponderous or joyfulif also with finality. Because he learned English
by reading it, his accent is very much his own, with some New York
inflections: You try and learn English in an all Yiddish household in the East
Bronx by sounding out the words of Blakes Prophecies, he explains. Often,
he will start a conversation with a direct, at times personal question, or a
sigh: Oh, how the Bloomian feet ache today!

INTERVIEWER
What are your memories of growing up?
HAROLD BLOOM
That was such a long time ago. Im sixty years old. I cant remember much of
my childhood that well. I was raised in an Orthodox East European Jewish
household where Yiddish was the everyday language. My mother was very
pious, my father less so. I still read Yiddish poetry. I have a great interest and
pleasure in it.
INTERVIEWER
What are your recollections of the neighborhood in which you grew up?
BLOOM
Almost none. One of my principal memories is that I and my friends, just to
survive, had constantly to fight street battles with neighborhood Irish toughs,
some of whom were very much under the influence of a sort of Irish-American
Nazi organization called the Silver Shirts. This was back in the 1930s. We
were on the verge of an Irish neighborhood over there in the East Bronx. We
lived in a Jewish neighborhood. On our border, somewhere around Southern
Boulevard, an Irish neighborhood began, and they would raid us, and we
would fight back. They were terrible street fights, involving broken bottles
and baseball bats. They were very nasty times. I say this even though Ive
now grown up and find that many of my best friends are Irish.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think your background helped in any way to shape your career?
BLOOM
Obviously it predisposed me toward a great deal of systematic reading. It

exposed me to the Bible as a sort of definitive text early on. And obviously
too, I became obsessed with interpretation as such. Judaic tradition
necessarily acquaints one with interpretation as a mode. Exegesis becomes
wholly natural. But I did not have very orthodox religious beliefs. Even when I
was quite a young child I was very skeptical indeed about orthodox notions of
spirituality. Of course, I now regard normative Judaism as being, as Ive often
said, a very strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible undertaken in the second
century in order to meet the needs of the Jewish people in a Palestine under
Roman occupation. And that is not very relevant to matters eighteen
centuries later. But otherwise, I think the crucial experiences for me as a
reader, as a child, did not come reading the Hebrew Bible. It came in reading
poetry written in English, which can still work on me with the force of a Bible
conversion. It was the aesthetic experience of first reading Hart Crane and
William Blakethose two poets in particular.
INTERVIEWER
How old were you at this point?
BLOOM
I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the
extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to
mein particular Blakes rhetoric in the longer poemsthough I had no
notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of the Collected Poems of
Hart Crane in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with
the extraordinary trope, O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits /
The agile precincts of the larks return. I was just swept away by it, by the
Marlovian rhetoric. I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed its the
first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still
have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in
1942. Its up on the third floor. Why is it you can have that extraordinary
experience (preadolescent in my case, as in so many other cases) of falling
violently in love with great poetry . . . where you are moved by its power
before you comprehend it? In some, a version of the poetical character is
incarnated and in some like myself the answering voice is from the beginning
that of the critic. I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could
secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane. Crane was dead
at the age of thirty-two, so one doesnt really know what he would have been
able to do. An immense loss. As large a loss as the death of Shelley at
twenty-nine or Keats at twenty-five. Crane had to do it all in only seven or
eight years.
INTERVIEWER
Did you read childrens stories, fairy tales?

BLOOM
I dont think so. I read the Bible, which is, after all, a long fairy tale. I didnt
read childrens literature until I was an undergraduate.
INTERVIEWER
Did you write verse as a child?
BLOOM
In spite of my interest, that never occurred to me. It must have had
something to do with the enormous reverence and rapture I felt about poetry,
the incantatory strength that Crane and Blake had for me from the beginning.
To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by
demons. To try to write in verse would have been a kind of trespass. Thats
something that I still feel very strongly.
INTERVIEWER
How was your chosen career viewed by your family?
BLOOM
I dont think they had any idea what I would be. I think they were
disappointed. They were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe with
necessarily narrow views. They had hoped that I would be a doctor or a
lawyer or a dentist. They did not know what a professor of poetry was. They
would have understood, I suppose, had I chosen to be a rabbi or a Talmudic
scholar. But finally, I dont think they cared one way or the other.
When I was a small boy already addicted to doing nothing but reading poems
in English, I was asked by an uncle who kept a candy store in Brooklyn what I
intended to do to earn a living when I grew up. I said, I want to read poetry.
He told me that there were professors of poetry at Harvard and Yale. Thats
the first time Id ever heard of those places or that there was such a thing as
a professor of poetry. In my five- or six-year-old way I replied, Im going to be
a professor of poetry at Harvard or Yale. Of course, the joke is that three
years ago I was simultaneously Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at
Harvard and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale! So in that sense I
was prematurely overdetermined in profession. Sometimes I think that is the
principal difference between my own work and the work of many other critics.
I came to it very early, and Ive been utterly unswerving.
INTERVIEWER
You are known as someone who has had a prodigious memory since
childhood. Do you find that your power of recall was triggered by the words

themselves, or were there other factors?

BLOOM
Oh no, it was immediate and it was always triggered by text, and indeed
always had an aesthetic element. I learned early that a test for a poem for
me was whether it seemed so inevitable that I could remember it perfectly
from the start. I think the only change in me in that regard has come mainly
under the influence of Nietzsche. It is the single way he has influenced me
aesthetically. Ive come to understand that the quality of memorability and
inevitability that I assumed came from intense pleasure may actually have
come from a kind of pain. That is to say that one learns from Nietzsche that
there is something painful about meaning. Sometimes it is the pain of
difficulty, sometimes the pain of being set a standard that one cannot attain.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever feel that reading so much was an avoidance of experience?
BLOOM
No. It was for me a terrible rage or passion that was a drive. It was fiery. It
was an absolute obsession. I do not think that speculation on my own part
would ever convince me that it was an attempt to substitute a more ideal
existence for the life that I had to live. It was love. I fell desperately in love
with reading poems. I dont think that one should idealize such a passion. I
certainly no longer do. I mean, I still love reading a poem when I can find a
really good one to read. Just recently, I was sitting down, alas for the first
time in several years, reading through Shakespeares Troilus and Cressida at
one sitting. I found it to be an astonishing experience, powerful and superb.
That hasnt dimmed or diminished. But surely it is a value in itself, a reality in
its own right; surely it cannot be reduced or subsumed under some other
name. Freud, doubtless, would wish to reduce it to the sexual thought, or
rather, the sexual past. But increasingly it seems to me that literature, and
particularly Shakespeare, who is literature, is a much more comprehensive
mode of cognition than psychoanalysis can be.
INTERVIEWER
Who are the teachers who were important to you? Did you study with the
New Critics at Yale?
BLOOM
I did not study with any of the New Critics, with the single exception being
William K. Wimsatt. Bill was a formalist and a very shrewd one, and from the
moment I landed in the first course that I took with him, which was in theories

of poetry, he sized me up. His comment on my first essay for him was, This is
Longinian criticism. Youre an instance of exactly what I dont like or want. He
was quite right. He was an Aristotelian; as far as I was concerned, Aristotle
had ruined Western literary criticism almost from the beginning. What I
thought of as literary criticism really did begin with the pseudo-Longinus. So
we had very strong disagreements about that kind of stuff. But he was a
remarkable teacher. We became very close friends later on. I miss him very
much. He was a splendid, huge, fascinating man, almost seven feet tall, a
fierce, dogmatic Roman Catholic, very intense. But very fair-minded. We
shared a passion for Dr. Samuel Johnson. I reacted so violently against him
that antithetically he was a great influence on me. I think thats what I meant
by dedicating The Anxiety of Influence to Bill. I still treasure the note he wrote
me after I gave him one of the early copies of the book. I find the dedication
extremely surprising, he said, and then added mournfully, I suppose it
entitles you to be Plotinus to Emersons Plato in regard to American
neoromanticism, a doctrine that I despise. Oh, yes, we had serious
differences in our feelings about poetry.
INTERVIEWER
What were your earliest essays like?
BLOOM
I dont think I wrote any essays until I was an undergraduate at Cornell. But
then a few years ago Bob Elias, one of my teachers there, sent me an essay I
had written on Hart Crane (which I had completely forgotten about) when I
was a Cornell freshman of sixteen or seventeen. I couldnt get myself to read
it. I even destroyed it. I shouldnt have. I should have waited until I could bear
to look at it. Im very curious as to what kind of thing it was.
INTERVIEWER
Are there other literary figures who were important to you early on?
BLOOM
A real favorite among modern critics, and the one I think influenced me
considerably, though no one ever wants to talk about him, was George Wilson
Knight. He was an old friend. Utterly mad. He made Kenneth Burke and
Harold Bloom look placid and mild. George died quite old. He was very
interested in spiritualism, and in survival after death. He told me a couple of
times that he believed it quite literally. There is a moment in The Christian
Renaissance that I think is the finest moment in modern criticism, because it
is the craziest. He is citing a spiritualist, F. W. H. Myers, and he quotes
something that Myers wrote and published, and then he quotes something

from a sance at which Myers came back and said something through a
medium, this astonishing sentence, which I give to you verbatim: These
quotations from F. W. H. Myers, so similar in style, composed before and after
his own earthly death, contain together a wisdom which our era may find it
hard to assimilate. I mean, perfectly straight about it! But the early books of
Wilson Knight are very fine indeedcertainly one of the most considerable
figures of twentieth-century criticism, though hes mostly forgotten now.
At this point we wander into the kitchen, where Mrs. Bloom is watching the
evening news.
BLOOM
Now lets wait for the news about this comeback for the wretched Yankees.
Ive been denouncing them. They havent won since 1979. Thats ten years
and theyre not going to win this year. Theyre terrible . . . Whats this?
[TV: The Yankees with their most dramatic win of the year this afternoon . . .
And the Tigers lost again.]
BLOOM
Oh my God! That means were just four games out. How very up-cheering.
MRS. BLOOM
Jessica Hahn.
BLOOM
Jessica Hahn is back!
[TV: . . . hired on as an on-air personality at a Top 40 radio station in Phoenix.]
BLOOM
How marvelous!
[TV: Playboy magazine had counted on Hahn to come through. She appeared
nude in a recent issue.]
BLOOM
Splendid . . . Let us start again, Antonio. What were we talking about?
We return to the living room.
INTERVIEWER
We were talking about your teachers and I was going to ask about the poets

youve known over the years.

BLOOM
Auden I knew pretty well, mostly through John Hollander. Eliot I never met.
Stevens I met just once. I was still a Cornell undergraduate. I came up to Yale
to hear him read the shorter version of Ordinary Evening in New Haven. It
was the first time I was ever in New Haven or at Yale for that matter. I got to
talk to him afterwards. It was a formidable experience meeting him. We
talked about Shelley, and he quoted a stanza of the Witch of Atlas to me,
which impressed me. Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is, it starts. Its a
chilly, rather beautiful poem. Robert Penn Warren and I were close friends.
Miss Bishop was of that younger generation also. Archie Ammons and I are
very close. There are quite a few others. Sometimes I used to correspond with
James Merrill when he was writing The Changing Light at Sandover. He kept
sending parts to me as it went along, and I kept writing him letters saying:
cant we have more J.M. and less of this stuff in capital letters? He said this
was the way it had to be, this was the way it was actually coming to him. I
realized I was going against my cardinal rule, which is dont argue with it, just
appreciate it.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any authors youd like to have known, but havent?
BLOOM
No. I should like to have known fewer authors than I have known, which is to
say nothing against all my good friends.
INTERVIEWER
Because it interferes with an honest assessment?
BLOOM
No. Its just that as one gets older, one is doomed, in this profession, to know
personally more and more authors. Most of them are in fact quite nice ladies
and gentlemen, but they have troubleeven ones very close friendstalking
to the tired, sad, humane old creature that one is. They seem to be more
conscious of ones profession as literary critic than one is necessarily
conscious of their profession as novelist or poet.
INTERVIEWER
Are there characters you would like to have known?
BLOOM

No, no. The only person I would like to have known, whom I have never
known, but its just as well, is Sophia Loren. I have been in love with Sophia
Loren for at least a third of a century. But undoubtedly it would be better
never to meet her. Im not sure I ever shall, though my late friend Bart
Giamatti had breakfast with her. Judging by photographs and recent film
appearances, she has held up quite well, though a little too slender nowno
longer the same gorgeous Neapolitan beauty, now a much more sleek beauty.
INTERVIEWER
Could you give us your opinion of some novelists? We could start with
Norman Mailer.
BLOOM
Oh, I have written on Norman a lot. I reviewed Ancient Evenings at some
length in The New York Review of Books and I came forth with a sentence that
did not please Norman, which Im still proud of. It was, Subscribers to the
Literary Guild will find in it more than enough humbuggery and bumbuggery
to give them their moneys worth. I had counted up the number of
homosexual and heterosexual bumbuggeries; I was rather impressed by the
total, including, unless I misremember, at one point the protagonist or
perhaps it was the godking successfully bumbuggering the lion. But then
Norman is immensely inventive in this regard. He told me the last time I saw
him that he is completing a manuscript of several thousand pages on the CIA.
That should be an amazing nightmare of a book since Normans natural grand
paranoid vision is one of everything being a conspiracy. So I should think that
might be very interesting indeed. What can one say? Mailer is an immense
imaginative energy. One is not persuaded that in the sheer mode of the
fantastic, he has found his proper mtier. Beyond a doubt his most impressive
single book is The Executioners Song, and that is, of course, very close
indeed to a transcript of what we want to call reality. So its rather ironic that
Norman should be more effective in the mode of Theodore Dreiser, giving us
a kind of contemporary American Tragedy or Sister Carrie in the Executioners
Song than in the modes he himself has wanted to excel in. I would think that
he is likely to impress future literary historians as having been a knowing
continuator of Dreiser, which is not an inconsiderable achievement.
INTERVIEWER
And William Gaddis?
BLOOM
Like everyone else, Ive never gotten over The Recognitions, but I differ from
those who have found the other two books worthy of him. I have had great

difficulty working my way through them. I assume that there is more to be

heard from him, but I am afraid that he is an instance of someone who in that
vast initial anatomy of a book, to use Mister Fryes phrase for that kind of
fictional writing, seems to have surpassed himself at the start . . . which is, of
course, in the famous American tradition.
INTERVIEWER
And Saul Bellow?
BLOOM
Hes an enormous pleasure but he does not make things difficult enough for
himself or for us. Like many others, I would commend him for the almost
Dickensian exuberance of his minor male characters who have carried every
one of his books. The central protagonist, always being some version of
himself, even in Henderson, is invariably an absurd failure, and the women,
as we all know, are absurdities; they are third-rate pipe dreams. The narrative
line is of no particular interest. His secular opinions are worthy of Allan
Bloom, who seems to derive from them. And Im not an admirer of the other
Bloom, as is well known. In general, Bellow seems to me an immensely
wasted talent though he certainly would not appreciate my saying so. I would
oppose to him a most extraordinary talentPhilip Roth. It does seem to me
that Philip Roth goes from strength to strength and is at the moment
startlingly unappreciated. It seems strange to say Philip is unappreciated
when he has so wide a readership and so great a notoriety, but Deception
was not much remarked upon and its an extraordinary tour de force.
INTERVIEWER
It was seen as an experiment or a sort of a leftover from
BLOOM
from The Counterlife. Well, The Counterlife, of course, deserved the praise
that it received. Its an astonishing book, though I would put it a touch below
the Zuckerman Bound trilogy with its marvelous Prague Orgy postlude or
coda. I still think My Life as a Man as well as, of course, Portnoys Complaint
are remarkable books. Theres the great episode of Kafkas whore in The
Professor of Desire. Ive written a fair amount about Philip. After a rather
unfortunate personal book called The Facts, which I had trouble getting
through, he has written a book about his late father called Patrimony, which
is both beautiful and immensely moving, a real achievement. The man is a
prose artist of great accomplishment. He has immense narrative exuberance,
and alsoI would insist upon thissince its an extremely difficult thing, as
we all know, to write successful humorous fiction and, though the laughter

Philip evokes is very painful indeed, he is an authentic comic novelist. Im not

sure at the moment that we have any other authentic comic novelist of the
first order.
INTERVIEWER
You have written that poetry is in an especially strong stage now. Is the same
true of fiction?
BLOOM
Although Ive been reading extensively and writing about it over the last few
years, it is very difficult for me to get a steady fix on the current kaleidoscope
of American fiction. Our most distinguished living writer of narrative fictionI
dont think you would quite call him a novelistis Thomas Pynchon, and yet
that recent book Vineland was a total disaster. In fact, I cannot think of a
comparable disaster in modern American fiction. To have written the great
story of Byron the lightbulb in Gravitys Rainbow, to have written The Crying
of Lot 49 and then to give us this piece of sheer ineptitude, this hopelessly
hollow book that I read through in amazement and disbelief, and which has
not got in it a redeeming sentence, hardly a redeeming phrase, is immensely
disheartening.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any response to the essay Tom Wolfe wrote urging the big,
Victor Hugolike novel?
BLOOM
He is, of course, praising his own Bonfire of the Vanities, which is a wholly
legitimate thing for an essayist-turned-novelist to do. But with all honor to
Tom Wolfe, a most amiable fellow and a former classmate of mine at Yale, and
as someone who enjoyed reading The Bonfire of the Vanities, I found very
little difference between it and his book of essays. He has merely taken his
verve and gift for writing the journalistic essay and moved it a little further
over the edge; but the characters are names on the pagehe does not try to
make them more than that. The social pressure is extraordinarily and vividly
conveyed. But hes always been remarkable for that. Hes still part of that
broad movement which has lifted a particular kind of high-pitched journalism
into a realm that may very nearly be aesthetic. On the other hand, I must say
I would rather reread The Bonfire of the Vanities than reread another Rabbit
volume by Mr. Updike. But then Mr. Updike and I, we are not a mutual
admiration society.
INTERVIEWER

Have you had run-ins with friends or writers whose books youve reviewed?
BLOOM
I wouldnt say run-ins exactly. Mr. Styron, who has, of course, his difficulties
and I sympathize with them, once at Robert Penn Warrens dinner table, when
I dared to disagree with him on a question of literary judgment, spoke up and
said, Your opinion doesnt matter, you are only a schoolteacher, which still
strikes me as perhaps the most memorable single thing that has been said to
me by any contemporary novelist.* I felt that Warrens poetry was greatly
preferable to his recent novels, and was trying to persuade Red to stop
writing novels. A Place to Come to, which Red to his dying day thought was a
novel of the eminence of World Enough and Time, At Heavens Gate, All the
Kings Men, and Night Rider, is a stillborn book and a terrible bore, though I
say that with great sadness. Whereas Red Warrens poetry from the
Incarnations in 1966 down to the end (he stopped writing poetry in the last
few years because he was too ill) was consistently the work of a great poet.
INTERVIEWER
Are there younger writers you enjoy reading?
BLOOM
I like this fellow Ted Mooney. I think something is going on there. Traffic and
Laughter, which Ive just read through, certainly has clatit certainly has a
lot of intensity. I dont know; there are so many that it is difficult to choose
among them. Its easier on the whole these days to think of poets than
novelists. Its very difficult for a novelist to break through. The form is not
showing a great deal of fecundity, except perhaps in Don DeLillo, who is a
superb inventor.
INTERVIEWER
What direction do you see the form taking?
BLOOM
I would suppose that in America we are leaning more and more towards
terrible millennial visions. I would even expect a religious dimension, a satiric
dimension, an even more apocalyptic dimension than we have been
accustomed to. I would expect the mode of fantasy to develop new
permutations.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that fictionor poetry for that mattercould ever die out?

BLOOM
Im reminded of that great trope of Stevenss in The Auroras of Autumn,
when he speaks of a great shadows last embellishment. Theres always a
further embellishment. It looks like a last embellishment and then it turns out
not to beyet once more, and yet once more. One is always saying farewell
to it, it is always saying farewell to itself, and then it perpetuates itself. One is
always astonished and delighted. When I introduced John Ashbery at one of
the poetry readings in the old days at Yale, I heard for the first time Wet
Casements. How it ravished my heart away the moment I heard it! Certainly
when I recite that poem myself and remember the original experience of
hearing him deliver it, its hard to see how any poem could be more
adequate. Clearly it is not a diminished or finished art form as long as a poem
like Wet Casements is still possible.
INTERVIEWER
I wanted to ask you about a period of time in the mid-sixties, which you have
described as a period of great upheaval and transition for you. You were
immersed in the essays of Emerson.
BLOOM
Yes, I started reading him all day long, every day, and pretty much
simultaneously reading Freud. People would look at me with amazement and
say, Well, what about Thoreau? He at least counts for something. And I would
look back at them in amazement and tell them what indeed was and is true,
that Thoreau is deeply derivative of Emerson and very minor compared to
him. Emerson is God.
INTERVIEWER
You were in analysis during this period. How did that go?
BLOOM
As my distinguished analyst said to me at the end, there had never been a
proper transference.
INTERVIEWER
You were unable to accept his authority?
BLOOM
I thought and still think that he is a very nice man, but as he wryly remarked,
I was paying him to give him lectures several times a week on the proper way
to read Freud. He thought this was quite self-defeating for both of us.

INTERVIEWER
Can a successful therapy ever be so closely allied to a reading of Freud?
BLOOM
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
INTERVIEWER
Its always interminable?
BLOOM
I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other
mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly
shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent.
Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and
uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or
wilted flowers.
INTERVIEWER
Were you worried about losing your creativity?
BLOOM
No, no. That was not the issue at all.
INTERVIEWER
You were having trouble writing at the time.
BLOOM
Oh yes. I was having all kinds of crises. I was, in every sense, in the middle
of a journey. On the other hand, this has been recurrent. Here I am sixty
years old and as much as ever Im in the middle of the journey. That is
something that goes with the territory. One just keeps going.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see yourself as a difficult critic, in the sense that you qualify certain
poets and prose fiction writers as difficult?
BLOOM
I would think, my dear, that most people these days might be kind enough to
call me difficult. The younger members of my profession and the members of
what I have called the School of Resentment describe me, I gather, as

someone who partakes of a cult of personality or self-obsession rather than

their wonderful, free, and generous social vision. One of them, I understand,
refers to me customarily as Napoleon Bonaparte. There is no way of dealing
with these people. They have not been moved by literature. Many of them
are my former students and I know them all too well. They are now gender
and power freaks.
But, no. The Anxiety of Influence is a difficult book. So is Kabbalah and
Criticism. Theyre books in which one is trying to discover something. But
Ruin the Sacred Truths is a very different book from these earlier ones, a very
simple book, to me quite transparent. Besides the aging process, and I hope
the maturing process, the major reason is that I am writing more for that
Johnsonian idealwhich, of course, does not exist anymorethe common
reader. I wouldnt dream of using a too technical word or term now if I could
possibly help it, and I dont think there are any in Ruin the Sacred Truths
except for facticity. I use that term and then dismiss it. I dont think that any
of my own special vocabulary, for which I have been condemned in the past
(and which was meant to expose how arbitrary all critical and rhetorical
terminology always is and has to be) is in that book. Nor do I think its
necessary to have read Kabbalah and Criticism or A Map of Misreading or any
other to understand the book. It is general literary criticism.
INTERVIEWER
How do you account historically for the school of resentment?
BLOOM
In the universities, the most surprising and reprehensible development came
some twenty years ago, around 1968, and has had a very long-range effect,
one that is still percolating. Suddenly all sorts of people, faculty members at
the universities, graduate and undergraduate students, began to blame the
universities not just for their own palpable ills and malfeasances, but for all
the ills of history and society. They were blamed, and to some extent still are,
by the budding school of resentment and its precursors, as though they were
not only representative of these ills but, weirdly enough, as though they had
somehow helped cause these ills and, even more weirdly, quite
surrealistically, as though they were somehow capable of ameliorating these
ills. Its still going onthis attempt to ascribe both culpability and apocalyptic
potential to the universities. Its really asking the universities to take the
place that was once occupied by religion, philosophy, and science. These are
our conceptual modes. They have all failed us. The entire history of Western
culture, from Alexandrian days until now, shows that when a societys
conceptual modes fail it, then willy-nilly it becomes a literary culture. This is
probably neither good nor bad, but just the way things become. And we cant

really ask literature or the representatives of a literary culture, in or out of the

university, to save society. Literature is not an instrument of social change or
an instrument of social reform. It is more a mode of human sensations and
impressions, which do not reduce very well to societal rules or forms.
INTERVIEWER
How does one react to the school of resentment? By declaring oneself an
aesthete?
BLOOM
Well, I do that now, of course, in furious reaction to their school and to so
much other pernicious nonsense that goes on. I would certainly see myself as
an aesthete in the sense advocated by Ruskin, indeed to a considerable
degree by Emerson, and certainly by the divine Walter and the sublime Oscar.
It is a very engaged kind of mode. Literary criticism in the United States
increasingly is split between very low level literary journalism and what I
increasingly regard as a disaster, which is literary criticism in the academies,
particularly in the younger generations. Increasingly scores and scores of
graduate students have read the absurd Lacan but have never read Edmund
Spenser; or have read a great deal of Foucault or Derrida but scarcely read
Shakespeare or Milton. Thats obviously an absurd defeat for literary study.
When I was a young man back in the fifties starting out on what was to be my
career, I used to proclaim that my chosen profession seemed to consist of
secular clergy or clerisy. I was thinking, of course, of the highly Anglo-Catholic
New Criticism under the sponsorship or demigodness of T. S. Eliot. But I
realized in latish middle age that, no better or worse, I was surrounded by a
pride of displaced social workers, a rabblement of lemmings, all rushing down
to the sea carrying their subject down to destruction with them. The school of
resentment is an extraordinary sort of mlange of latest-model feminists,
Lacanians, that whole semiotic cackle, latest-model pseudo-Marxists, socalled New Historicists, who are neither new nor historicist, and third
generation deconstructors, who I believe have no relationship whatever to
literary values. Its really a very paltry kind of a phenomenon. But it is
pervasive, and it seems to be waxing rather than waning. It is a very rare
thing indeed to encounter one critic, academic or otherwise, not just in the
English-speaking world, but also in France or Italy, who has an authentic
commitment to aesthetic values, who reads for the pleasure of reading, and
who values poetry or story as such, above all else. Reading has become a
very curious kind of activity. It has become tendentious in the extreme. A
sheer deliquescence has taken place because of this obsession with the
methods or supposed method. Criticism startsit has to startwith a real
passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but
you must fall in love with poems. You must fall in love with what we used to

call imaginative literature. And when you are in love that way, with or
without provocation from good teachers, you will pass on to encounter what
used to be called the sublime. And as soon as you do this, you pass into the
agonistic mode, even if your own nature is anything but agonistic. In the end,
the spirit that makes one a fan of a particular athlete or a particular team is
different only in degree, not in kind, from the spirit that teaches one to prefer
one poet to another, or one novelist to another. That is to say there is some
element of competition at every point in ones experience as a reader. How
could there not be? Perhaps you learn this more fully as you get older, but in
the end you choose between books, or you choose between poems, the way
you choose between people. You cant become friends with every
acquaintance you make, and I would not think that it is any different with
what you read.
INTERVIEWER
Do you foresee any change, or improvement, in the critical fashions?
BLOOM
I dont believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to
the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it
just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better
or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current
phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally
provide its own corrective. That is to say, sooner or later, students and
teachers are going to get terribly bored with all the technocratic social work
going on now. There will be a return to aesthetic values and desires, or these
people will simply do something else with their time. But I find a great deal of
hypocrisy in what theyre doing now. It is tiresome to be encountering myths
called The Social Responsibility of the Critic or The Political Responsibility
of the Critic. I would rather walk into a bookstore and find a book called The
Aesthetic Responsibilities of the Statesman, or The Literary Responsibilities
of the Engineer. Criticism is not a program for social betterment, not an
engine for social change. I dont see how it possibly could be. If you look for
the best instance of a socially radical critic, you find a very good one indeed
in William Hazlitt. But you will not find that his social activism on the left in
any way conditions his aesthetic judgments, or that he tries to make
imaginative literature a machine for revolution. You would not find much
difference in aesthetic response between Hazlitt and Dr. Samuel Johnson on
Milton, though Dr. Johnson is very much on the right politically, and Hazlitt, of
course, very much an enthusiast for the French Revolution and for English
radicalism. But I cant find much in the way of a Hazlittian or Johnsonian
temperament in life and literature anywhere on the current scene. There are
so many tiresomenesses going on. Everyone is so desperately afraid of being

called a racist or a sexist that they connivewhether actively or passively

the almost total breakdown of standards that has taken place both in and out
of the universities, where writings by blacks or Hispanics or in many cases
simply women are concerned.
INTERVIEWER
This movement has helped focus attention on some great novels, though.
Youre an admirer, for example, of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man.
BLOOM
Oh, but that is a very, very rare exception. What else is there like Invisible
Man? Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God has a kind of
superior intensity and firm control. Its a very fine book indeed. It surprised
and delighted me when I first read it and it has sustained several rereadings
since. But that and Invisible Man are the only full scale works of fiction I have
read by American blacks in this century that have survival possibilities at all.
Alice Walker is an extremely inadequate writer, and I think that is giving her
the best of it. A book like The Color Purple is of no aesthetic interest or value
whatsoever, yet it is exalted and taught in the academies. It clearly is a time
in which social and cultural guilt has taken over.
INTERVIEWER
I know you find this to be true of feminist criticism.
BLOOM
Im very fond of feminist critics, some of whom are my close friends, but it is
widely known Im not terribly fond of feminist criticism. The true test is to find
work, whether in the past or present, by women writers that we had
undervalued, and thus bring it to our attention and teach us to study it more
closely or more usefully. By that test they have failed, because they have
added not one to the canon. The women writers who matteredJane Austen,
George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and others who
have always mattered on aesthetic groundsstill matter. I do not appreciate
Elizabeth Bishop or May Swenson any more or less than I would have
appreciated them if we had no feminist literary criticism at all. And I stare at
what is presented to me as feminist literary criticism and I shake my head. I
regard it at best as being well-intentioned. I do not regard it as being literary
criticism.
INTERVIEWER
Can it be valued as a form of social or political literary criticism?

BLOOM
Im not concerned with political or social criticism. If people wish to practice
it, that is entirely their business. It is not mine, heavens! If it does not help
me to read a work of aesthetic value then Im not going to be interested in it
at all. I do not for a moment yield to the notion that any social, racial, ethnic,
or male interest could determine my aesthetic choices. I have a lifetime of
experience, learning, and insight that tells me this.
INTERVIEWER
What do you make of all this recent talk of the canonical problem?
BLOOM
It is no more than a reflection of current academic and social politics in the
United States. The old test for what makes a work canonical is if it has
engendered strong readings that come after it, whether as overt
interpretations or implicitly interpretive forms. Theres no way the gender and
power boys and girls, or the New Historicists, or any of the current set are
going to give us new canonical works, any more than all the agitation of
feminist writing or nowadays what seems to be called African American
writing is going to give us canonical works. Alice Walker is not going to be a
canonical poet no matter how many lemmings stand forth and proclaim her
sublimity. It really does seem to me a kind of bogus issue. I am more and
more certain that a great deal of what now passes for literary study of the socalled politically correct variety will wash aside. It is a ripple. I give it five
years. I have seen many fashions come and go since I first took up literary
study. After forty years one begins to be able to distinguish an ephemeral
surface ripple from a deeper current or an authentic change.
INTERVIEWER
You teach Freud and Shakespeare.
BLOOM
Oh yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that Im not interested in a
Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of
Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the
Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. Theres a lot of
resentment on Freuds part because I think he recognizes this. What we think
of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the
most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldnt be too surprising. Freud
himself says the poets were there before me, and the poet in particular is
necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that.
Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical

invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic,

never mind a Cartesian or Jungian invention. Its not just that Shakespeare
gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; Im not so sure he
doesnt largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying
something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of
Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing
Shakespeare with God. I dont see why one shouldnt, as it were. Most of what
we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was
permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that Ive had in
teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isnt anyone before
Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human
figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, and
then brooding out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what
they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing
a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or
personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted
in representation. But it doesnt exist before Shakespeare. It doesnt happen
in the Bible. It doesnt happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesnt even happen
in Euripides. Its pretty clear that Shakespeares true precursorwhere he
took the hint fromis Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into
Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where
Chaucer gets that from, thats a very pretty question. It is a standing
challenge I have put to my students. Thats part of Chaucers shocking
originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small
degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. Its his common stock. The ability to
do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is
purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we cant see its
originality anymore. The originality of it is bewildering.
By the way, I was thinking recently about this whole question as it relates to
the French tradition. I gave what I thought was a remarkable seminar on
Hamlet to my undergraduate Shakespeare seminar at Yale. About an hour
before class, I had what I thought was a very considerable insight, though I
gather my students were baffled by it. I think that I was trying to say too
much at once. It had suddenly occurred to me that the one canon of French
neoclassical thought that was absolutely, indeed religiously, followed by
French dramatistsand this means everyone, even Molire and Racinewas
that there were to be no soliloquies and no asides. No matter what dexterity
or agility had to be displayed, a confidante had to be dragged onto the stage
so that the protagonist could have someone to whom to address cogitations,
reflections. This accounts not only for why Shakespeare has never been
properly absorbed by the French, as compared to his effect on every other
European culture, language, literature, dramatic tradition, but also for the
enormous differences between French and Anglo-American modes of literary

thought. It also helps account for why the French modes, which are having so
absurd an effect upon us at this time, are so clearly irrelevant to our literature
and our way of talking about literature. I can give you a further illustration. I
gave a faculty seminar a while ago, in which I talked for about two hours
about my notions of Shakespeare and originality. At the end of it, a woman
who was present, a faculty member at Yale, who had listened with a sort of
amazement and a clear lack of comprehension, said with considerable
exasperation, Well you know Professor Bloom, I dont really understand why
youre talking about originality. It is as outmoded as, say, private enterprise in
the economic sphere. An absurdity to have put myself in a situation where I
had to address a member of the school of resentment! I was too courteous,
especially since my colleague Shoshana Felman jumped in to try to explain to
the lady what I was up to. But I realized it was hopeless. Here was a lady who
came not out of Racine and Molire but in fact out of Lacan, Derrida, and
Foucault. Even if she had come out of Racine and Molire, she could never
have hoped to understand. I remember what instantly flashed through my
head was that I had been talking about the extraordinary originality of the
way Shakespeares protagonists ponder to themselves and, on the basis of
that pondering, change. She could not understand this because it never
actually happens in the French drama; the French critical mind has never
been able to believe that it is appropriate for this to happen. Surely this is
related to a mode of apprehension, a mode of criticism in which authorial
presence was never very strong anyway, and so indeed it could die.
INTERVIEWER
Can you explain how you came to notice this about Shakespeares
protagonists?
BLOOM
Yes, I can even remember the particular moment. I was teaching King Lear,
and Id reached a moment in the play that has always fascinated me. I
suddenly saw what was going on. Edmund is the most remarkable villain in all
Shakespeare, a manipulator so strong that he makes Iago seem minor in
comparison. Edmund is a sophisticated and sardonic consciousness who can
run rings around anyone else on the stage in King Lear. He is so foul that it
takes Goneril and Regan, really, to match up to him . . . Hes received his
death wound from his brother; hes lying there on the battlefield. They bring
in word that Goneril and Regan are deadone slew the other and then
committed suicide for his sake. Edmund broods out loud and says, quite
extraordinarily (its all in four words), Yet Edmund was belovd. One looks at
those four words totally startled. As soon as he says it, he starts to ponder
out loud. What are the implications that, though two monsters of the deep,
the two loved me so much that one of them killed the other and then

murdered herself. He reasons it out. He says, The one the other poisond for
my sake / And after slew herself. And then he suddenly says, I pant for life,
and then amazingly he says, Some good I mean to do / despite of mine own
nature, and he suddenly gasps out, having given the order for Lear and
Cordelia to be killed, Send in time, to stop it. They dont get there in time.
Cordelias been murdered. And then Edmund dies. But thats an astonishing
change. It comes about as he hears himself say in real astonishment, Yet
Edmund was belovd, and on that basis, he starts to ponder. Had he not said
that, he would not have changed. Theres nothing like that in literature before
Shakespeare. It makes Freud unnecessary. The representation of inwardness
is so absolute and large that we have no parallel to it before then.
INTERVIEWER
So that the Freudian commentary on Hamlet by Ernest Jones is unnecessary.
BLOOM
Its much better to work out what Hamlets commentary on the Oedipal
complex might be. Theres that lovely remark of A. C. Bradleys that
Shakespeares major tragic heroes can only work in the play that theyre in
that if Iago had to come onto the same stage with Hamlet, it would take
Hamlet about five seconds to catch onto what Iago was doing and so
viciously parody Iago that he would drive him to madness and suicide. The
same way, if the ghost of Othellos dead father appeared to Othello and said
that someone had murdered him, Othello would grab his sword and go and
hack the other fellow down. In each case there would be no play. Just as the
plays would make mincemeat of one another if you tried to work one into the
other, so Shakespeare chops up any writer you apply him to. And a
Shakespearean reading of Freud would leave certain things but not leave
others. It would make one very impatient, I think, with Freuds representation
of the Oedipal complex. And its a disaster to try to apply the Freudian
reading of that to Hamlet.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever acted Shakespeare?
BLOOM
Only just once, at Cornell. I was pressed into service because I knew Father
Falstaff by heart. But it was a disaster. I acted as though there were no one
else on stage, something that delights my younger son when I repeat it. As a
result, I never heard cues, I created a kind of gridlock on stage. I had a good
time, but no one else did. Not long ago President Reagan, who should be
remembered only for his jokes because his jokes I think are really very good,

was asked how it was he could have managed eight years as president and
still look so wonderful. Did you see this?
INTERVIEWER
No.
BLOOM
It was in the Times. He said, Let me tell you the story about the old
psychiatrist being admired by a young psychiatrist who asks, How come you
still look so fresh, so free of anxiety, so little worn by care, when youve spent
your entire life sitting as I do every day, getting worn out listening to the
miseries of your patients? To which the older psychiatrist replies, Its very
simple, young man. I never listen. Such sublime, wonderful, and sincere
self-revelation on the part of Reagan! In spite of all ones horror at what he
has done or failed to do as President, it takes ones breath away with
admiration. Thats the way I played the part of Falstaff. Im occasionally asked
by old friends, who dont yet know me well enough, if I had ever considered
becoming a psychoanalyst. I look at them in shock and say, Psychoanalyst!
My great struggle as a teacher is to stop answering my own questions! I still
think, though no one in the world except me thinks so and no ones ever
going to give me an award as a great teacher, Im a pretty good teacher, but
only in terms of the great Emersonian maxim that which I can receive from
another is never tuition but only provocation. I think that if the young
woman or man listens to what I am saying, she or he will get very provoked
indeed.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever teach from notes? Or do you prefer to improvise?
BLOOM
I have never made a note in my life. How could I? I have internalized the text.
I externalized it in different ways at different times. We cannot step even
once in the same river. We cannot step even once in the same text.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of creative-writing workshops?
BLOOM
I suppose that they do more good than harm, and yet it baffles me. Writing
seems to me so much an art of solitude. Criticism is a teachable art, but like
every art it too finally depends upon an inherent or implicit gift. I remember
remarking somewhere in something I wrote that I gave up going to the

Modern Language Association some years ago because the idea of a

convention of twenty-five or thirty thousand critics is every bit as hilarious as
the idea of going to a convention of twenty-five thousand poets or novelists.
There arent twenty-five thousand critics. I frequently wonder if there are five
critics alive at any one time. The extent to which the art of fiction or the art of
poetry is teachable is a more complex problem. Historically, we know how
poets become poets and fiction writers become fiction writersthey read.
They read their predecessors and they learn what is to be learned. The idea
of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that the word processor has had or is having any effect on the
study of literature?
BLOOM
There cannot be a human being who has fewer thoughts on the whole
question of word processing than I do. Ive never even seen a word processor.
I am hopelessly archaic.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps you see an effect on students papers then?
BLOOM
But for me the typewriter hasnt even been invented yet, so how can I speak
to this matter? I protest! A man who has never learned to type is not going to
be able to add anything to this debate. As far as Im concerned, computers
have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can
only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, theyre called, a black
Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And
then someone else types it.
INTERVIEWER
And someone else edits?
BLOOM
No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise much?
BLOOM

Sometimes, but not often.

INTERVIEWER
Is there a particular time of day when you like to write?
BLOOM
There isnt one for me. I write in desperation. I write because the pressures
are so great, and I am simply so far past a deadline that I must turn out
something.
INTERVIEWER
So you dont espouse a particular work ethic on a daily basis?
BLOOM
No, no. I lead a disordered and hurried life.
INTERVIEWER
Are there days when you do not work at all?
BLOOM
Yes, alas, alas, alas. But one always thinks about literature. I dont recognize
a distinction between literature and life. I am, as I keep moaning, an
experimental critic. Ive spent my life proclaiming that what is called critical
objectivity is a farce. It is deep subjectivity which has to be achieved, which
is difficult, whereas objectivity is cheap.
INTERVIEWER
What is it that you think keeps you from writing when youre unable to write?
BLOOM
Despair, exhaustion. There are long periods when I cannot write at all. Long,
long periods, sometimes lasting many years. Sometimes one just has to lie
fallow. And also, you know, interests change. One goes into such different
modes. What was incredibly difficult was the commentary on the J-Writer,
which underwent real change for me as I became more and more convinced
that she was a woman, which made some considerable difference. I mean,
obviously its just a question of imagining it one way or another. No one will
ever demonstrate it, that he was a man or she was a woman. But I find that if
I imagine it that J was a woman, it produces, to me, more imaginatively
accurate results than the other way around.

INTERVIEWER
But do you think that the importance of the J-Writers being a woman has
been exaggerated?
BLOOM
Oh, immensely exaggerated. In an interview that was published in The New
York Times, the extremely acute Richard Bernstein allowed me to remark at
some length on my strong feeling, more intense than before, that on the
internal, that is to say psychological and literary evidence, it is much more
likely to have been a woman than a man. I also saidI believe this quite
passionatelythat if I had it to do over again, I wouldnt have mentioned the
putative gender of the author. It has served as a monstrous red herring that
has diverted attention away from what is really controversial and should be
the outrage and scandal of the book, which is the fact that the godthe
literary character named Yahweh or Godhas absolutely nothing in common
with the God of the revisionists in the completed Torah and therefore of the
normative Jewish tradition and of Christianity and Islam and all their
branches.
INTERVIEWER
Certainly that aspect of the book has caught the notice of the normative
Jewish reviewers.
BLOOM
The normative Jewish reviewers have reacted very badly, in particular Mr.
Robert Alter. And the other Norman Podhorrorstype review was by his
henchman, Neil Kozody, a subscriber to the Hotel Hilton Kramer criteria. (The
marvelous controversialist Gore Vidal invariably refers to that dubiety as the
Hotel Hilton Kramer.) Mr. Kozody, in playing Tonto to the Lone Ranger, went
considerably further than Mr. Alter in denouncing me for what he thought was
my vicious attack on normative Judaism. And indeed, Ive now heard this from
many quarters, including from an absurd rabbinical gentleman who reviewed
it in Newsday and proclaimed, What makes Professor Bloom think there was
such a thing as irony three thousand years ago?which may be the funniest
single remark that anyone could make about this or any other book.
But Im afraid it isnt over. Its just beginning. There was a program at
Symphony Space, where Claire Bloom and Fritz Weaver read aloud from the
Bible, and I spoke for ten minutes at the beginning and end. I got rather
carried away. In the final ten minutes I allowed myself not only to answer my
normative Jewish critics, but to start talking about what I feel are the plain
spiritual inadequacies for a contemporary intellectual Jewry. It has been

subsequently broadcast, and all hell may break loose. Many a rabbi and
Jewish bureaucrat has been after my scalp.
INTERVIEWER
What did you say?
BLOOM
Well, I allowed myself to tell the truth, which is always a great mistake. I said
that I could not be the only contemporary Jewish intellectual who was very
unhappy indeed that the Holocaust had been made part of our religion. I did
not like this vision of six million versions of what the Christians call Jesus, and
I did not believe that if this was going to be offered to me as Judaism it would
be acceptable. I also allowed myself to say that the god of the J-Writer seems
to me a god in whom I scarcely could fail to believe, since that god was all of
our breath and vitality. Whereas what the Redactor, being more a censor than
an author of the Hebrew Bible, and the priestly authors and those that came
after in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition, gave us are simply not
acceptable to a person with literary sensibility or any high spirituality at this
time.
INTERVIEWER
How have you found being in the public eye? The Book of J is your first book
on the best-seller list.
BLOOM
Though its the first time, Im informed, that a work of literary criticism or
commentary has been on the best-seller list, it has not been a pleasant
experience.
INTERVIEWER
How so?
BLOOM
I did not, on the whole, relish the television and radio appearances, which I
undertook because of the plain inadequacies of the publisher. The people who
work for that publisher did the best they could, but they were understaffed,
undermanned, never printed enough books, and have most inadequate
advertising. I know that all authors complain about that, but this is manifest.
INTERVIEWER
You were on Good Morning America of all things.

BLOOM
I was on Good Morning America, I was on Larry King, and many others. I must
say that I came away with two radically opposed insights. One is the
remarkably high degree of civility and personal civilization of both my radio
and TV interlocutors. In fact, theyre far more civilized and gentlemanly or
gentlewomanly than journalistic interviewers usually are, and certainly more
so than the so-called scholarly and academic reviewers, who are merely
assassins and thugs. But also, after a lifetime spent teaching, it was very
difficult to accept emotionally that huge blank eye of the TV camera, or the
strange bareness of the radio studio. There is a terrible unreality about it that
I have not enjoyed at all.
INTERVIEWER
You have mentioned you might write on the aesthetics of outrage as a topic.
BLOOM
Yes, the aesthetics of being outraged. But I dont mean being outraged in that
other sense, you know, that sort of postsixties phenomenon. I mean in the
sense in which Macbeth is increasingly outraged. What fascinates me is that
we so intensely sympathize with a successful or strong representation of
someone in the process of being outraged, and I want to know why. I suppose
its ultimately that were outraged at mortality, and it is impossible not to
sympathize with that.
INTERVIEWER
This is a topic that would somehow include W. C. Fields.
BLOOM
Oh yes, certainly, since I think his great power is that he perpetually
demonstrates the enormous comedy of being outraged. I have never
recovered from the first time I saw the W. C. Fields short, The Fatal Glass of
Beer. It represents for me still the high point of cinema, surpassing even
Grouchos Duck Soup. Have you seen The Fatal Glass of Beer? I dont think I
have the critical powers to describe it. Throughout much of it, W. C. Fields is
strumming a zither and singing a song about the demise of his unfortunate
son, who expires because of a fatal glass of beer that college boys persuade
the abstaining youth to drink. He then insults a Salvation Army lassie, herself
a reformed high-kicker in the chorus line, and she stuns him with a single
high kick. But to describe it in this way is to say that Macbeth is about an
ambitious man who murders the King.
INTERVIEWER

So in addition to being an outrageous critic, are you an outraged critic, in that

sense?
BLOOM
No, no. I hope that I am not an outrageous critic, but I suppose I am. But
thats only because most of the others are so dreadfully tame and senescent,
or indeed are now politically correct or content to be social reformers who try
to tell us there is some connection between literature and social change.
Outraged? No, I am not outraged. I am not outraged as a person. I am beyond
it now. Im sixty years and seven months old. Its too late for me to be
outraged. It would really shorten my life if I let myself be outraged. I dont
have the emotional strength anymore. It would be an expense of spirit that I
cannot afford. Besides, by now nothing surprises me. You know, the literary
situation is one of a surpassing absurdity. Criticism in the universities, Ill
have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with
ninety-five percent of what goes on. Its Stalinism without Stalin. All the traits
of the Stalinist in the 1930s and 1940s are being repeated in this whole
resentment in the universities in the 1990s. The intolerance, the selfcongratulation, smugness, sanctimoniousness, the retreat from imaginative
values, the flight from the aesthetic. Its not worth being truly outraged
about. Eventually these people will provide their own antidote, because they
will perish of boredom. I will win in the end. I must be the only literary critic of
any eminence who is writing today (I cannot think of another, Im sad to say,
however arrogant or difficult this sounds) who always asks about what he
reads and likes, whether it is ancient, modern, or brand new, or has always
been laying around, who always asks: How good is it? What is it better than?
What is it less good than? What does it mean? and Is there some relation
between what it means and how good or bad it is, and not only how is it good
or bad, but why it is good or bad? Mr. Frye, who was very much my precursor,
tried to banish all of that from criticism, just as I tried to reintroduce a kind of
dark sense of temporality, or the sorrows of temporality, into literary criticism
as a correction to Fryes Platonic idealism. I have also raised more explicitly
than anyone else nowadays or indeed anyone since Johnson or Hazlitt, the
question of why does it matter. There has to be some relation between the
way in which we matter and the way in which we read. A way of speaking and
writing about literature that addresses itself to these matters must seem
impossibly naive or old-fashioned or not literary criticism at all to the
partisans of the school of resentment. But I believe that these have been the
modes of Western literary criticism ever since Aristophanes invented the art
of criticism by juxtaposing Euripides with Aeschylus (to the profound
disadvantage of Euripides), or indeed ever since Longinus started to work off
his own anxieties about Plato by dealing with Platos anxieties about Homer.
This is the stuff literary criticism has always done and, if it is finally to be of

any use to us, this is what I think it must get back to. It really must answer
the questions of good and bad and how and why. It must answer the question
of what the relevance of literature is to our lives, and why it means one thing
to us when we are one way and another thing to us when we are another. It
astonishes me that I cannot find any other contemporary critic who still
discusses the pathos of great literature, or is willing to talk about why a
particular work does or does not evoke great anguish in us. This is of course
dismissed as the merest subjectivity.
INTERVIEWER
Can essays like Hazlitts or Ruskins or Paters still be written today?
BLOOM
Most people would say no. I can only say I do my best. Thats as audacious a
thing as I can say. I keep saying, though nobody will listen, or only a few will
listen, that criticism is either a genre of literature or it is nothing. It has no
hope for survival unless it is a genre of literature. It can be regarded, if you
wish, as a minor genre, but I dont know why people say that. The idea that
poetry or, rather, verse writing, is to take priority over criticism is on the face
of it absolute nonsense. That would be to say that the verse-writer Felicia
Hemans is a considerably larger figure than her contemporary William Hazlitt.
Or that our eras Felicia Hemans, Sylvia Plath, is a considerably larger literary
figure than, say, the late Wilson Knight. This is clearly not the case. Miss Plath
is a bad verse writer. I read Knight with pleasure and profit, if at times wonder
and shock. These are obvious points but obviously one will have to go on
making them. Almost everything now written and published and praised in
the United States as verse isnt even verse, let alone poetry. Its just typing,
or word processing. As a matter of fact, its usually just glib rhetoric or social
resentment. Just as almost everything that we now call criticism is in fact just
journalism.
INTERVIEWER
Or an involvement with what you refer to as the easier pleasures. What are
these easier pleasures?
BLOOM
Well, I take the notion from my friend and contemporary Angus Fletcher, who
takes it from Shelley and Longinus. Its perfectly clear some very good writers
offer only easier pleasures. Compare two writers exactly contemporary with
one anotherHarold Brodkey and John Updike. Updike, as I once wrote, is a
minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable
stylist. Ive read many novels by Updike, but the one I like best is The Witches

of Eastwick. But for the most part it seems to me that he specializes in the
easier pleasures. They are genuine pleasures, but they do not challenge the
intellect. Brodkey, somewhat imperfectly perhaps, does so to a much more
considerable degree. Thomas Pynchon provides very difficult pleasures, it
seems to me, though not of late. I am not convinced, in fact, that it was he
who wrote Vineland. Look at the strongest American novelist since Melville,
Hawthorne, and James. That would certainly have to be Faulkner. Look at the
difference between Faulkner at his very best in As I Lay Dying and at his very
worst in A Fable. A Fable is nothing but easier pleasures, but theyre not even
pleasures. It is so easy it becomes, indeed, vulgar, disgusting, and does not
afford pleasure. As I Lay Dying is a very difficult piece of work. To try to
apprehend Darl Bundren takes a very considerable effort of the imagination.
Faulkner really surpasses himself there. It seems to me an authentic instance
of the literary sublime in our time. Or, if you look at modern American poetry,
in some sense the entire development of Wallace Stevens is from affording us
easier pleasures, as in The Idea of Order at Key West, and before that
Sunday Morning, to the very difficult pleasures of Notes toward a Supreme
Fiction and then the immensely difficult pleasures of a poem like The Owl in
the Sarcophagus. You have to labor with immense intensity in order to keep
up. It is certainly related to the notion propounded by both Burckhardt and
Nietzsche, which Ive taken over from them, of the agonistic. There is a kind
of standard of measurement starting with Plato on through Western thought
where one asks a literary work, implicity, to answer the question more,
equal to, or less than? In the end, the answer to that question is the
persuasive force enabling a reader to say, I will sacrifice an easier pleasure
for something that takes me beyond myself. Surely that must be the
difference between Marlowes The Jew of Malta and Shakespeares The
Merchant of Venice, an enigmatic and to me in many ways unequal play. I get
a lot more pleasure out of Barabas than I do out of the equivocal Shylock, but
Im well aware that my pleasure in Barabas is an easier pleasure, and that my
trouble in achieving any pleasure in reading or viewing Shylock is because
other factors are getting in the way of apprehending the Shakespearean
sublime. The whole question of the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice is for
me one of the astonishing tests of what I would call the sublime in poetry.
One has the trouble of having to accommodate oneself to it.
INTERVIEWER
You recently completed a stint as general editor for the Chelsea House series,
a sort of encyclopedia of literary criticism, consisting of some five hundred
volumes.
BLOOM
I havent completed it, but it has slowed down. It has been a very strange

kind of a process. It swept me away in a kind of fantastic rush. I couldnt do it

again like that and I wouldnt want to do it again, but it was very intense
while it lasted. When it reached its height I was writing fifteen of those
introductions a month, so that every two days I had to write another. I had to
reread everything, and crystallize my views very quickly. But I like that kind of
writing. I learned a great deal doing it, because you couldnt waste any time.
You had to get to the kernel of it immediately, and in seven to twelve pages
say what you really thought about it without wasting time on scholarly
outreaches or byways.
INTERVIEWER
How do you manage to write so quickly? Is it insomnia?
BLOOM
Partly insomnia. I think I usually write therapeutically. That is what Hart Crane
really taught one. I was talking to William Empson about this once. He never
wrote any criticism of Crane, and he didnt know whether he liked his poetry
or not, but he said that the desperation of Cranes poetry appealed to him.
Using his funny kind of parlance, he said that Hart Cranes poetry showed
that poetry is now a mugs game, that Crane always wrote every poem as
though it were going to be his last. That catches something in Crane which is
very true, that he writes each lyric in such a way that you literally feel hes
going to die if he cant bring it off, that his survival not just as a poet but as a
person depends upon somehow articulating that poem. I dont have the
audacity to compare myself to Crane, yet I think I write criticism in the spirit
in which he wrote poems. One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from
going mad. One writes to be able to write the next piece of criticism or to live
through the next day or two. Maybe its an apotropaic gesture, maybe one
writes to ward off death. Im not sure. But I think in some sense thats what
poets do. They write their poems to ward off dying.
INTERVIEWER
You were for some time writing a major work on Freud to be called
Transference and Authority. Whats become of that?
BLOOM
Well, its a huge, yellowing manuscript. I dont know whether I would have
finished it, but for the five years before the Chelsea House New Haven factory
closed down I increasingly had to give my work to writing those introductions.
I dont regret it, since it allowed me for the first time to become a really
general literary critic. But I had to set the Freud aside. Perhaps in four or five
years Ill get back to it. I would still like to write a book on Freud, but I dont

think it will be the Transference and Authority book. Ive got a huge
manuscript that tries to comment on every important essay or monograph of
Freuds, but I dont think I would want to publish it. I would not want to write
on Freud as though he were a kind of scripture. I would have to rethink the
whole thing. The title was a giveaway, I now realize. I could never work out
my own transference relationship with regard to the text of Freud, and I could
never decide how much authority it did or didnt have for me. I suppose I
foundered upon that, so its a kind of tattered white elephant. Its up in the
atticseven or eight hundred pages of typescript. But I think I have
abandoned in manuscript more books and essays than Ive ever printed. The
attic is full of them. Eventually I may make a bonfire of the whole thing.
INTERVIEWER
Youve also referred to a sequel to Flight to Lucifer, your one novel.
BLOOM
I wrote about half the sequel to it, called The Lost Travelers Dream, about a
changeling child, a kind of gnostic concept, though it was much less doctrinal
than A Flight to Lucifer. I thought it was a much better piece of writing, and a
couple of people whom I showed it to thought it had real promise. But I
brooded on it one night, about 1981 or 1982, and I shut my notebook, took
the manuscript, and put it up in the attic; its still up there, and if I ever live
long enough and there are no changes in my life I might take it down. Flight
to Lucifer is certainly the only book that I wish I hadnt published. It was all
right to have composed it, but I wish I hadnt published it. I sat down one
night, six months after it came out, and read through it. I thought it was
particularly in the last third or soquite well-written, but I also felt it was an
atrociously bad book. It failed as narrative, as negative characterization. Its
overt attempt to be a sort of secret sequel to that sublime and crazy book A
Voyage to Arcturus failed completely. It had no redeeming virtues. It was a
kind of tractate in the understanding of gnosticism. It clearly had many
obsessive critical ideas in it. The Flight to Lucifer now reads to me as though
Walter Pater were trying to write Star Wars. Thats giving it the best of it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find you have slowed down at all since your incredibly prolific period
in the seventies?
BLOOM
I dont know that Im a burned-out husk but one becomes so dialetically
aware of the history of literature that one requires some multiple
consciousness of oneself in regard to the total work of others. One gets more

and more addicted to considering the relationship between literature and life
in teaching and writing. In fact, there are certain things that had been
possible at an early age that are not possible anymore. I find that anything of
any length Im now trying to write is what once would have been called
religious. Im writing this book called The American Religion: A Prophecy,
whose title, of course, echoes Blakes America: A Prophecy. It is meant to be a
somewhat outrageous but I hope a true and useful book. It begins with our
last election and leads into the whole question of the American spirit and
American literature and above all the American religionwhich existed before
Emerson but to which Emerson gave the decisive terms. The religion of the
United States is not Christianity; perhaps it never was Christianity, but is a
curious form of American gnosis. It is a mighty queer religion, exhilarating in
some ways but marked by destructiveness. It seems to me increasingly that
George Bush won hands down and had to win because of the two candidates
he more nearly incarnated the ideals and visions of the American religion.
Our foreign policy basically amounts to making the world safe for gnosticism.
INTERVIEWER
Youve written that the Christian Bible is, on the whole, a disappointment.
BLOOM
The aesthetic achievement is so much less than that of the Oldor original
Testament. The New Testament is a very curious work from a literary point of
view. So much of it is written by writers who are thinking in Aramaic and
writing in demotic Greek. And that curious blend of Aramatic syntax with a
Greek vocabulary is a very dubious medium. Its particularly egregious in the
Revelation of St. John the Divine, the Apocalypse, which is a very bad and
hysterical and nasty piece of writing. Even the most powerful parts of the
New Testament from a literary point of viewcertain epistles of Paul and the
Gospel of Johnare not works that can sustain a close aesthetic comparison
with the stronger parts of the Hebrew Bible. It is striking how the Apocalypse
of John has had an influence out of all proportion to its aesthetic, or for that
matter, I would think, its spiritual value. It is not only an hysterical piece of
work, but a work lacking love or compassion. In fact, it is the archetypal text
of resentment, and it is the proper foundation for every school of resentment
ever since.
INTERVIEWER
Is belief anything more than a trope for you now?
BLOOM
Belief is not available to me. It is a stuffed bird, up on the shelf. So is

philosophy, let me point out, and so, for that matter, is psychoanalysisan
institutional church founded upon Freuds writings, praxis, and example.
These are not live birds that one can hold in ones hand. We live in a literary
culture, as I keep saying. This is not necessarily goodit might even be bad
but it is where we are. Our cognitive modes have failed us.
INTERVIEWER
Can belief be as individual and idiosyncratic as fiction?
BLOOM
The religious genius is a dead mode. Belief should be as passionate and
individual a fiction as any strong, idiosyncratic literary work, but it isnt. It
almost never is. Religion has been too contaminated by society, by human
hatreds. The history of religion as an institutional or social mode is a
continuous horror. At this very moment we see this with the wretched Mr.
Rushdie, who, by the way, alas, is not much of a writer. I tried to read
Midnights Children and found myself quite bored; I have tried to read The
Satanic Verses, which seems to me very wordy, very neo-Joycean, very much
an inadequate artifice. It is not much better than an upper-middle-brow
attempt at serious fiction. Poor wretched fellow, who can blame him? Theres
no way for him to apologize because the world is not prepared to protect him
from the consequences of having offended a religion. All religions have
always been pernicious as social, political, and economic entities. And they
always will be.
INTERVIEWER
Are you still watching the TV evangelists?
BLOOM
Oh yes, I love the TV evangelists, especially Jimmy Swaggart. I loved above
all his grand confession starting I have sinned . . ., which he delivered to all
of America with his family in the front row of the auditorium. One of the most
marvelous moments in modern American culture! I enjoyed it immensely. It
was his finest performance. And then the revelation by the lady, when she
published her article, that he never touched her! And he was paying her
these rather inconsiderable sums for her to zoombinate herself while he
watched. Oh dear. Its so sad. Its so terribly sad.
INTERVIEWER
Ive heard that you occasionally listen to rock music.
BLOOM

Oh sure. My favorite viewing, and this is the first time I have ever admitted it
to anyone, but what I love to do, when I dont watch evangelicals, when I
cant read or write and cant go out walking, and dont want to just tear my
hair and destroy myself, I put on, here in New Haven, cable channel thirteen
and I watch rock television endlessly. As a sheer revelation of the American
religion its overwhelming. Yes, I like to watch the dancing girls too. The sex
part of it is fine. Occasionally its musically interesting, but you know, ninetynine out of a hundred groups are just bilge. And there hasnt been any good
American rock since, alas, The Band disbanded. I watch MTV endlessly, my
dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole
ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. Its the
image of reality that it sees, and its quite weird and wonderful. It confirms
exactly these two points: first, that no matter how many are on the screen at
once, not one of them feels free except in total self-exaltation. And second, it
comes through again and again in the lyrics and the way one dances, the way
one moves, that what is best and purest in one is just no part of the creation
that myth of an essential purity before and beyond experience never goes
away. Its quite fascinating. And notice how pervasive it is! I spent a month in
Rome lecturing and I was so exhausted at the end of each day that my son
David and I cheerfully watched the Italian mtv. I stared and I just couldnt
believe it. Italian MTV is a sheer parody of its American counterpart, with
some amazing consequencesthe American religion has made its way even
into Rome! It is nothing but a religious phenomenon. Very weird to see it take
place.
INTERVIEWER
Has the decision to be a critic . . . or its not really a decision, I suppose.
BLOOM
Its not a decision, its an infliction.
INTERVIEWER
Has the vocation of criticism been a happy one?
BLOOM
I dont think of it in those terms.
INTERVIEWER
Satisfying?
BLOOM
I dont think of it in those terms.

INTERVIEWER
Inevitable only?
BLOOM
People who dont like me would say so. Denis Donoghue, in his review of Rain
the Sacred Truths, described me as the Satan of literary criticism. That I take
as an involuntary compliment. Perhaps indeed it was a voluntary compliment.
In any case, Im delighted to accept that. Im delighted to believe that I am by
merit raised to that bad eminence.
INTERVIEWER
Are there personal costs to being the Satan of literary criticism?
BLOOM
I cant imagine what they would be. All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said,
condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves. Or as an even greater
figure, Sir John Falstaff, said, Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation. I
would much rather be regarded, of course, as the Falstaff of literary criticism
than as the Satan of literary criticism. Much as I love my Uncle Satan, I love
my Uncle Falstaff even more. Hes much wittier than Satan. Hes wiser than
Satan. But then, Shakespeares an even better poet than Milton.
INTERVIEWER
Is there anything you feel especially required to complete right now, as a
teacher or as a critic? Something just beyond view?
BLOOM
Well, I intend to teach Shakespeare for the rest of my life. I would like to write
a general, comprehensive study on Shakespeare, not necessarily
commenting on every play or every scene, but trying to arrive at a total view
of Shakespeare. One always wants to write about Shakespeare. But by then I
may be too old I think.
INTERVIEWER
Are you being fruitfully misread, as you would say, by anyone?
BLOOM
I hope that somewhere in the world there is a young critic or two who will
strongly misread me to their advantage. Lord knows, one is not Samuel
Johnson or William Hazlitt or John Ruskin, or even Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde
as critic. But, yes, I hope so.

You know, Ive learned something over the years, picking up copies of my
books in secondhand bookstores and in libraries, off peoples shelves. Ive
written so much and have now looked at so many of these books that Ive
learned a great deal. You also learn this from reviews and from things that are
cited in other peoples books and so on, or from what people say to you
what you pride yourself on, the things that you think are your insight and
contribution . . . no one ever even notices them. Its as though theyre just for
you. What you say in passing or what you expound because you know it too
well, because it really bores you, but you feel you have to get through this in
order to make your grand point, thats what people pick up on. Thats what
they underline. Thats what they quote. Thats what they attack, or cite
favorably. Thats what they can use. What you really think youre doing may
or may not be what youre doing, but it certainly isnt communicated to
others. Ive talked about this to other critics, to other writers; they havent
had quite my extensive sense of this, but it strikes an answering chord in
them. Ones grand ideas are indeed ones grand ideas, but there are none
that seem to be useful or even recognizable to anyone else. Its a very
strange phenomenon. It must have something to do with our capacity for not
knowing ourselves.
* Mr. Styron wishes to point out that his annoyance was not with H.B.s critical
views with which he agreesbut that they were offered in Penn Warrens
presence. [Ed.]
Author photograph by Nancy Crampton.

Thom Gunn, The Art of Poetry No. 72

Interviewed by Clive Wilmer ISSUE 135, SUMMER 1995
undefined
THOM GUNN 1960 HAMPSTEAD-WHITE STONE POND.

Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, on the southern bank of the Thames
estuary, in 1929. His childhood was spent mostly in that county, Kent, and in
the affluent suburb of Hampstead in northwest London. A relatively happy
boyhood was overshadowed first by his parents divorce when he was ten and
then by his mothers suicide when he was fifteen. In 1950, after two years
national service in the army, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to
study English. This was during the heyday of F. R. Leavis, whose lectures had
a profound effect on Gunns early poetry.

It was in Cambridge that he discovered his homosexuality, falling in love with

his lifelong partner, an American student named Mike Kitay. The wish to stay
with Kitay led him to apply for American scholarships, and in 1954 he took up
a creative writing fellowship at Stanford, where he studied with Yvor Winters.
In 1960 he settled with Kitay in San Francisco and has lived there ever since,
though longish spells have been passed in other places, notably London,
where he lived on a travel grant from 1964 to 1965. For most of his time in
California he has earned at least part of his income from the English
Department at Berkeley, where he now teaches one semester a year.
His first book of poetry, Fighting Terms, written while he was at Cambridge,
was published in 1954. Seven major collections have followed: The Sense of
Movement (1957), My Sad Captains (1961), Touch (1967), Moly (1971), Jack
Straws Castle (1976), The Passages of Joy (1982), and The Man with Night
Sweats (1992). Other publications have included Positives (1967), a collection
of verse captions to photographs by his brother Ander; editions of the work of
Fulke Greville (1968) and Ben Jonson (1974); and a volume of critical and
autobiographical prose, The Occasions of Poetry (1982). At the time of this
interview he was assembling his Collected Poems (1994) and another volume
of prose, Shelf Life (1993).
As a poet who lives in the United States yet is still thought of as an
Englishman, Gunn is probably less widely read and discussed than his striking
talent deserves. Nevertheless, he is much anthologized and has been the
recipient of several literary prizes, the most recent being, in Britain, the first
Forward Prize for Poetry (1992) and, in the U.S., a fellowship or genius grant
from the MacArthur Foundation (1993).
There has always been a heroic edge to Thom Gunns poetry. That being the
case, his appearance does not disappoint. He is tall and, for a man in his
early sixties, remarkably lean and youthful. Tattooed arms and a single
earring give him a faintly piratical air. In one of his poems he confesses to a
liking for loud music, bars, and boisterous men, and a certain boisterous
charm is one of his own most pleasing characteristics: as we talk, he laughs a
great deal, very loudly, with rambunctious pleasure. He enjoys any hint of the
vulgar or the tasteless, yet he is also a man of considerable refinement.
Modest, considerate, and softly spoken, he was once described to me by one
of his American friends as the perfect English gentleman.
Such complexities, even ambiguities, run deep. One of the most deeply erotic
poets of our time, his style has often been praised for chastity. A celebrator
of the sense of movement, he is strongly attached to his home and his
routine. The occasion of this interview, for instance, is his first visit to his
native country in thirteen years.

He was staying in his old university city of Cambridge and he visited my

house every morning for three days. In all, we recorded three hours of
conversation: we chatted with the tape on and stopped when we felt the talk
beginning to flag. He was a relaxed interviewee, amusing and informative. He
didnt mind talking about personal matters, but he stopped well short of
narcissism. What he said came across as spontaneous and yet one felt he
was also well prepared. One was left with a sense of experience not easily
translated into words.

INTERVIEWER
I wonder if we could begin with a brief description of how you live. I get the
feeling, for instance, that youre quite fond of routine.
THOM GUNN
Well, if you havent got a routine in your life by the age of sixty-two, youre
never going to get it. I spend half the year teaching and half the year on my
own. I like the idea of scheduling my own life for half the year, but by the end
of that time Im really ready to teach again and have somebody elses
timetable imposed on me, because Im chaotic enough that I just couldnt be
master of myself for the entire year. It would leave me too loose and
unregulated. As I say, Im eager to teach again in January and then, during
the term, very often Ill think of ideas for writing on but I usually dont have
time to work them out. By the time I can work them out at the end of the
term, Ive either lost them or else Ive got them much more complex and
intense, so thats good too. I like the way my life has worked out very well. I
live with some other men in a house in San Francisco. Somebody once said,
Oh, youve got a gay commune. I said, No, its a queer household!which I
think was a satisfactory answer. Right now theres only three of us there.
There were fiveone of them left and one of them died of AIDS. But we really
fit in well together. We really do work as a family; we cook in turn, stuff like
that. We do a lot of things together.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a writing routine?
GUNN
When anybody says, Do you have a routine, I always say piously its very
important to have one, but in fact I dont. I write poetry when I can and when
I cant, I write reviews, which I figure at least is keeping my hand in, doing
some kind of writing. Finally, however difficult it is, it does make me happy in
some weird way to do the writing. Its hard labor but it does satisfy something

in me very deeply. Sometimes when I havent written in some time, I really

decide Im going to work toward getting the requisite fever, and this would
involve, oh, reading a few favorite poets intensively: Hardy, for example, John
Donne, Herbert, Basil Buntingany one of a number of my favorites. I try to
get their tunes going in my head so I get a tune of my own. Then I write lots
of notes on possible subjects for poetry. Sometimes that works, sometimes it
doesnt. Its been my experience that sometimes about ten poems will all
come in about two months; other times it will be that one poem will take ages
and ages to write.
INTERVIEWER
Do you tend to work very hard on poemsrevising and so on?
GUNN
It depends on the poem. Some poems come out almost right on the first draft
you really have to make very few small alterations. Others you have to pull
to pieces and put together again. Those are two extremesit might be
anything between them. For instance, I have a poem called Nasturtium. I
worked at it for ages and then decided it was just terrible. I only kept about
one line, but then I rewrote the poem from a slightly different ideaI dont
remember the difference between the two, but it was a completely different
poem from the first draft, and I think it only has about one or two lines in
common with it. Only the last two lines, I think.
INTERVIEWER
When you start writing a poem, do you ever have a form in your head before
you write, or do you always discover the form in writing?
GUNN
Again, sometimes I do, sometimes I dont. For example, a poem called Street
Song. Part of the idea of that poem was to write a modern version of an
Elizabethan or Jacobean street song. So of course I knew it was going to
rhyme, that it might have some kind of refrainit was going to be a particular
kind of poem. Other poems I dont really know what theyre going to be like
and I will jot down my notes for them kind of higgledy-piggledy all over the
page, so that when I look at what Ive got maybe the form will be suggested
by what I have there. Thats mostly what happens with me. I dont start by
writing a couplet or something, knowing the whole things going to be in
coupletsthough even that has happened.
INTERVIEWER
I know that you quite consciously and deliberately draw on other writers and

writings in your poems. Could you describe that process a little? Do you quite
ruthlessly plagiarize or pilfer?
GUNN
Yes, yes, yes. Well, T. S. Eliot gave us a pleasing example, didnt he, quoting
from people without acknowledgment? I remember a line in Ash Wednesday
that was an adaptation of Desiring this mans art and that mans scope.
When I was twenty, I thought that was the most terrific line Id read in Eliot! I
didnt know that it was a line from Shakespeares sonnets. I dont resent that
in Eliot and I hope people dont resent it in me. I dont make such extensive
use of unacknowledged quotation as Eliot does, but every now and again Ill
make a little reference. This is the kind of thing that poets have always done.
On the first page of The Prelude, Wordsworth slightly rewrites a line from the
end of Paradise Lost: The earth is all before me instead of The world was
all before them. He was aware that many an educated reader would
recognize that as being both a theft and an adaptation. He was also aware,
Im sure, that a great many of his readers wouldnt know it was and would
just think it was original. Thats part of the process of readingyou read a
poem for what you can get out of it.
INTERVIEWER
Actually, though, what you do much more often is model your poems on other
poems.
GUNN
Well, I grew up when New Criticism was at its height and I took some of the
things the New Critics said very literally. When I read, lets say, George
Herbert, I really do think of him as being a kind of contemporary of mine. I
dont think of him as being separated from me by an impossible four hundred
years of history. I feel that in an essential way this is a man with a very
different mind-cast from mine, but I dont feel myself badly separated from
him. I feel that were like totally different people with different interests
writing in the same room. And I feel that way of all the poets I like.
INTERVIEWER
Donald Davie says of you in Under Briggflatts that you dont use literary
reference, as Eliot does, to judge the tawdry present. He finds that
refreshing.
GUNN
I dont regret the present. I dont feel its cheap and tawdry compared with
the past. I think the past was cheap and tawdry too. One of the things I

noticed very early onand I probably got it from an essay by Eliotwas that
the beginning of Popes Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady is
virtually taken from the beginning of the Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet by
Ben Jonson. Now I dont think most of Popes readers would have realized
that. I dont think Jonson was that much read in Popes time. I may be wrong .
. . So I figured that was a very interesting thing to be able to do. But no, I
dont do it in the way Eliot and Pound doto show up the present. I do it
much more in the way Ive described Wordsworth or Pope as doing it.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any particular influences that have been consistentlyor
intermittentlyimportant for you?
GUNN
The first poet who influenced me in a big wayin poems that never got into
printwas W. H. Auden. Im speaking about when I was about nineteen or
twenty. Hes someone Im profoundly grateful to for giving me by his example
the feeling that I could write about my experience. Anne Ridler, I think, said
this many years agothat his example enabled her to write. Thats what his
example did for meit made things seem easy, and the poetry I wrote then
I doubt if any of it exists any longerwas riddled with Audenesque
mannerisms. But he was tremendously helpful to me. Hes not been an
influence Ive gone back to, however. The biggest two influences after him
were, in my first year as an undergraduate, John Donne and Shakespeare. I
read Donne en masse and understood him for the first time. I had tried
reading him in my teens and I guess I just wasnt mature enough to know
what to do with it. Suddenly I could see and it was tremendously exciting.
Then, that summer vacation, I read all of Shakespeare. I read everything by
Shakespeare and doing that adds a cubit to your stature. Hes so inventive
with language. Its the idea of concepts and experience going into language,
and going into exciting languageof creating the language for your poem as
youre writing it. Of course, both of those influences have returned. Who has
not been influenced by Shakespeare? Even somebody who doesnt like the
influence, somebody like Pound, is influenced ultimately. Then, of course,
Yeats was an influence . . .
INTERVIEWER
Let me put a more specific question. Could you name anybody who has
extended your sensibilityopened you up to things in experience that you
were not sufficiently aware of?
GUNN

Anybody I enjoy reading has always done this. A literary influence is never
just a literary influence. Its also an influence in the way you see everything
in the way you feel your life. Im not sure that this affected my poetry, but I
read Proust when I was about twenty, just before I went to Cambridge. (We
went to university rather late in those days. We had to do national service
first, you should remember.) Of course, when you read all of Proust, you live
in a Proustian world for a moment. You know, that bus conductor may be
homosexual! So may your grandfatheror anybody maybe! I remember
when I went to Chartres for the first time, I was all set to have a Proustian
disappointment and I didnt! Instead I had absolute delight; it was even better
than I expected it to be. But every writer does this to you to some extent.
Auden, Donne, Shakespeare, YeatsI was about to say Yvor Wintersall of
these modified the way in which I see the whole of my experience. I dont
think theres any one person more than others. And I dont lose them: I never
lost Donne, I never lost Yeats really. William Carlos Williams came later on.
INTERVIEWER
Can we take Williams as an example? You got interested in his work inwhat?
the late fifties. Shortly afterwards your poetry began changing a lot and
started including things from the world which it hadnt included before.
GUNN
Its very interesting you should say things from the world. Up to about
halfway through My Sad Captainsthat is, my first two-and-a-half booksI
was trying to write heroic poetry. There are interesting reasons for this. When
I was at Cambridge, as Ive said, I was very much influenced by Shakespeare
and of course much of Shakespeare deals with the heroic of a certain kind.
This was emphasized by the fact that I was at Cambridge with a particular
generation of talented actors and directors. Some of them went on to become
famouspeople like Peter Wood, Peter Hall, and John Barton, who directed
remarkable productions of Coriolanus, of The Alchemist, of Loves Labours
Lost, of Edward IIall sorts of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. My great
friend Tony White was an actor in many of those. I was in some sense trying
to write, with Sartres help, a modern equivalent to heroic poetry. The
influence of Williams altered everything. Id been reading him a bit, but I
couldnt incorporate that influence until I started to write in syllabics and that
was about 1959 perhapsthe poems from the second half of My Sad
Captains. There I found a way, with Williamss help, of incorporating the more
casual aspects of life, the nonheroic things in life that are of course a part of
daily experience and infinitely valuable. I suppose I could have learned that
from Hardy too but I wasnt very influenced by him at that time. Id read and
liked some Hardy, but you cant always incorporate your learning from a poet
at the time when you first start admiring that poet. Then I got into rather a

mess with my next book, Touch, and some of that book seems to me
distinctly inferior in that I really wasnt quite sure how to connect the poetry
of everyday life and the heroic poetrywhich is greatly to oversimplify the
two kinds. But I wanted to make some kind of connection. I maybe started to
do so when I wrote a longish poem called Misanthropos, which is included
in that book.
INTERVIEWER
Lets go back to the beginning. When did you first realize that this business of
writing poetry was going to be the main activity of your life?
GUNN
I started writing poetry, as many people do, in my teens. I was also trying to
write novels, none of which I ever finished. I also wrote short stories and
plays. I wanted to be a writer and, if I had succeeded in any of these, that
might have shaped my future. However, I only succeeded in poetry. The first
poem I published was at the end of my first year at Cambridge. A graduate
student editing The Cambridge Review whom I did not personally know said
something very nice about it in printa man called Peter Green, whos now
famous for his books about Greece, Macedonia, and Alexander the Great.
That gave me a tremendous amount of confidence. I dont know whether I
said I was going to be a poet but I wanted to write a lot of poetry. During that
summer, when I read all of Shakespeare, I also set myself to write a poem a
week, and I carried on doing that for the next two years. Of course a lot of
them were really worthless, imitative junk, but it was wonderful the way that
a poem turned up just about every week. Then of course it all slackened, but I
suppose that happens when a lot of people start. You have everything to try
out; you have to find out who you are. Your poetry has no identity at first. You
dont have much identity at that ageI was twenty-one to twenty-two.
INTERVIEWER
Your first two books seem very unhappy in comparison with the later ones . . .
GUNN
All young men are unhappy. Thats why they identify so strongly with Hamlet.
Theyre unhappy in a formless kind of way, partly because they dont have an
identitythey dont know where theyre going; they dont know who they are.
Youre a pretty unusual personsomething slightly sinisterif at the age of
twenty or twenty-two you really know exactly who you are and what youre
going to do. More likely youre undefined, and being undefined is rather
painful. I dont know that I was more sorry for myself than anybody else was.
I was trying to be brave about it too. Of course, I was striking posturesit

was also sexual identity. There was such duplicity in my mind about the whole
sexual question; I was not terribly willing to be a homosexual but it did seem
that I was. I really cant trace the convolutions in my mind until in fact I fell in
love. That made up my mind and that, I should think, made me a good deal
happier, though the whole of my second book was written after that . . . so
maybe it didnt make my poetry that much happier! It certainly made me
happier as a person. I guess I was so used to writing unhappy poetry that I
just went on writing it!
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the problems of your own childhood contributed to the need to
write? The compensation theory . . .
GUNN
Quite possibly, but I dont know. How is one to find out? I had, I think, a very
happy childhood until about the age of fifteen, perhaps, when my mother
killed herself. Then I was devastated for about four years. I very much retired
into myself. I read an enormous number of Victorian novels and eighteenthcentury ones too. I read them very much as an escape, and it was an escape
into another time when I didnt have to face this problem of a suicided
mother. I gradually came out of it, but it was a difficult four years or so. I
dont think I knew how difficult they were at the timeluckilyso maybe
originally I wrote as a way of getting out of that, but I cant tell.
INTERVIEWER
This aspiration towards the heroic in the early bookswas it part of the
escape or part of the opening up?
GUNN
Part of the opening up. That was a way of asserting my strength. One of my
favorite words was energyin my conversation and probably in my poetry as
well. When I felt really good, there was a wonderful feeling of the physical
energy of the body and the energy of the mind too. They went in tandem.
Sometimes I felt physically an almost unlimited energy. It was extraordinary.
Like a young tree feeling the sap going through its branches. That was a
great cause for rejoicing and that comes into my early poetry. It was probably
why I harnessed so much onto a Sartrean idea of the will, because the will for
me seemed to be a way of channeling the energy. I obviously use that word
far too much in those early poemsit becomes monotonous.
INTERVIEWER
How conscious were you when you used the word will that it also means the

penis?
GUNN
Not at all. I didnt find out till years later that when Shakespeare uses the
word will it means the penis. I dont think we had very adequately footnoted
editions of the sonnets in those days, because I read through all the footnotes
in my editionI had to study it for my exams. But I never came across it!
INTERVIEWER
But do you think its significant nonetheless?
GUNN
Yes, I do. So I was getting it unconsciously. But I dont think I found out until
my thirties. I was astonished when I did!
INTERVIEWER
In those early books you establish almost a kind of map of terms and
conceptions that stay with you all through, though they get more ghostly and
more complex later on. Theyre things like the will and energy, and the figure
of the soldier, and the concept of self, and posing, and this whole idea of risk
as something which helps to define the self. Is that something that youre
conscious of as you workthat you have this structure, almost, that you build
on?
GUNN
Well, I dont think conceptually about my poetry very much. I try not to think
as a critic. I try not to think of key words; otherwise I would start being overly
self-conscious about using them. But some of them I just cant avoid noticing,
and of course theyre also life-images. Now the idea of the soldier: my
childhood was full of soldiers. I tried to write about this in a poem called The
Corporal. I was ten at the beginning of World War Two and sixteen when it
ended, so my visual landscape was full of soldiers. Of course, I became a
soldier for two years of national service and so that was another kind of
soldier. It was a strange kind of role I had to measure myself against. And the
idea of the will: theres a poem in The Man with Night Sweats called The
Differences and in the last two lines I say that I think back on that night in
January, / When casually distinct we shared the most / And lay upon a bed of
clarity / In luminous half-sleep where the will was lost. So that is not willed
love at all. This was a very conscious reference back to my overuse of the
word will in my early books. Im saying in a sense that Im no longer the same
person as I was then and Im pleased that Im not the same person. So there
is a certain consciousness of themes but, at the same time, theres a certain

blessed unconsciousness. There was a review for which I was profoundly

grateful in the Times Literary Supplement by Hugh Haughton: he was
reviewing my recent book, The Man with Night Sweats, and he traced the
imagery of embracing and touching and holding handsand even embracing
oneself at one point. That was extraordinary; it was all there. That was not
planned, it was due to the consistency of my own mind. We all have that kind
of consistency of course. Its a question of opening yourself up to what you
really want to say, to what for you is the truth, and you come out with
consistent images in that way. Ive not been aware of that, Ive really not
been aware of that, and of course the embrace is in half the poems in the
book. I was glad I didnt find that out till the book was finished! So one does
not operate in complete rational awareness of what ones doing all the time,
and I dont want to. I seem to write awfully rational poetry, but I want there to
be a considerable amount of strength given from what is not conscious into
the consciousness therethat kind of energy. (I wont talk about the
unconscious.) Ive noticed recently Ive been particularly attracted by various
things in visual art or in poetry that I explain to myself as being a mixture of
the extremely sophisticated and the primitive. I was just pointing out this
morning some lines from Spensers Epithalamion. Theyre the ones about
who is it which at my window peeps. It is the moon, who walks about high
heaven all the night. Its a wonderfully sophisticated and ornate kind of
poetry, and suddenly this tremendously physical, almost anthropomorphic
image of the moon walking around the sky. Its so magnificent! I find them
wonderfully beautiful lines! I think that kind of thing happens in some way in
all the art I like. Id like that to happen in my poetry. I think that sometimes
when my poetry comes offanybodys poetry when it comes offits making
use of two strengths at once: a very conscious arranging strength, keeping
things in schematic form, but also the stuff you can call primitive or
unconscious.
INTERVIEWER
So you have the controlling mind or intellect, but its a control thats prepared
to allow things to slip in . . .
GUNN
Yes, allowing, very good word, yes. Its a control that will still allow things to
slip under. Welcomes them in fact.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to the soldier for a minute, one rather striking thing about that
figure is the way it establishes an atmosphere for those early books. At the
time there was a lot of talk, much of it rather vacuous, about violence in
those poems. I remember Ted Hughes saying somewhere that he thought this

emphasis on violence superficial and what was much more important in your
work was tenderness. Dont the two things go together?
GUNN
Of course, of course. I can quote from The Missing, a passage in which Im
speaking about a sense of the gay communitya phrase I always thought
was bullshit, until the thing was vanishing. In The Missing I speak about the
Image of an unlimited embrace, and I mean partly friends, partly sexual
partners, partly even the vaguest of acquaintances, with the sense of being
in some way part of a community. I did not just feel ease, though
comfortable: / Aggressive as in some ideal of sport, / With ceaseless
movement thrilling through the whole, / Their push kept me as firm as their
support. Take that image of sport. (Somebody pointed out that I constantly
use the word play in The Man with Night Sweats, which is, again, something I
wasnt completely aware of.) If you use the idea of sport, you think of the
violence of the push, yes, but theres an ambiguity: an embrace can be a
wrestlers embrace or it can be the embrace of love. Theres tremendous
doubleness in that imagewhich I have used elsewhere, in factthe idea of
the embrace that can be violent or tender. But if you look at it at any one
moment, if its frozen, it could be either, and maybe the two figures swaying
in that embrace are not even quite sure which it is. Like Aufidius and
Coriolanus: they embrace, theyre enemies. They embrace in admiration at
one point. Its ambiguous because the two things are connected. It could turn
at any moment from the one to the other, I suppose.
INTERVIEWER
When you first went to America, you studied at Stanford under Yvor Winters.
What youre saying at the moment reminds me of Winterss emphasis on
rigor and discipline. So the idea that when youre writing youre up against
some sort of resistance all the timetheres an element of masculine
struggle in it.
GUNN
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
Was Winters very important to you?
GUNN
Tremendously important, yes. I underplayed his importance for many years
because I was afraid of itbecause he was such a strong person. I was afraid
he might suck me into his own personality and I would simply be a disciple. I

now feel Im a strong enough son to be able to acknowledge my father figure

fully! He was important to me in ways Im not even sure I can completely
identify or speak about. I mean, I can speak about things that have some
importance but are obviously not the whole story, like matters of meter. I do
think, as he did, that a meter should be correct. I dont like a sloppy meter,
which is what most people write nowadays. But the extent of Winterss
influence on me I find myself unable to assess. He would have been appalled
at the idea that I was queer. But he was a friend and was very good to me. I
liked him very muchI loved him. And I feel a huge debt of gratitude towards
him. Im not sure I would have been able to admit this twenty years ago, but I
think it would be fair enough to say that his definition of a poem is essentially
my definition of a poem: a statement in words about a human experience
which is rather large, but he meant with moral import. Well, I once showed
a poem of mine to a friend to see what he thought of it and I said, Do you
think its too didactic? And he saidgiving me a pitying lookThom, your
poetry is always didactic! And its true! It is! So I certainly take morality as
part of my poetry, as in that poem The Missing for example. I make moral
evaluations of a life that many people would consider totally immoral.
INTERVIEWER
You didnt quite finish what you were saying about meter. You said sloppy
meter is what most people write nowadays . . .
GUNN
Well, it is. If you look at most of my contemporaries and most new poems,
they write something thats not quite free verse and not quite meter. I would
say that it comes ultimately from the example of Eliot and because The
Waste Land was so wonderful (and I must say its a poem I find more
wonderful as I get older) they have an example of how it can be treated at its
best. By it I mean basically an iambic pentameter kind of broken up, made
uneven. We know that he made it uneven on Jacobean precedents: people
like Webster and Tourneur. There is a little genuine free verse in The Waste
Land. On the whole it can be scanned iambically and mostly its iambic
pentameter. There are whole passages of perfect iambic pentameter; there
are also passages of very much broken-up pentameter. Many of the people
who write in this way do so with a sense that its OK to bring in a few extra
syllablesyoure just making things more casual. Actually, I think youre
making things more indefinite and sloppier and less memorable. Metrical
poetry is ultimately allied to song, and I like the connection. Free verse is
ultimately allied to conversation, and I like that connection too. Not many
people can mix the two. Eliot could, obviously, and the great shining modern
example of somebody who could, too, is Basil Bunting. If you go through
Briggflatts, for example, it is very difficult to define what is happening

metrically, but whatever is is happening wonderfully. He would have used a

musical analogy. If you just take that first part of Briggflatts, you cant scan
it. There is obviously some kind of meter at work thereits not free verse
but you dont really know when its trimeter, when its tetrameter, or when
its varying between the two. Certain lines could be read either as trimeter or
tetrameter in light of what went before. The first line is
Brag, sweet ten-or bull,
which one would be inclined to read as a trimeter, but the next line is
Descant on Raw-they's mad-rigal,
which is clearly a tetrameter. In that case, going back, you might choose to
read the first line as a tetrameter too:
Brag, sweet ten-or bull.
Thats the kind of ambiguity Im speaking about. It occurs constantly. Its not
a particularly modernist ambiguity in the meter of a single line. For years, for
example, I read Shakespeares line
When ic-icles hang by the wall
as
When ic-icles hang by the wall
as a three-foot line. But its not; its a tetrameter line because the rest of the
poem is in tetrameter. You can go back to Shakespeares line because you
know the whole of the rest of the poem is in tetrameter, so you just read it
incorrectly. Theres much greater ambiguity in Bunting because you dont
know what the basic norm is. This is possibly a pedantic question, because it
works so well that its just a question of analysis. But its something very few
people are able to do.
INTERVIEWER
You once said to me that free verse and metrical verse are different in kind.
Did you mean by that that, from your point of view as a writer, to write in free
verse is almost as different from writing in meter as it is again from writing in
prose?
GUNN
Yes, as a form, given the essential difference that prose is enormously
expansive and that most good poetry tends to be condensed. That makes for
the major difference. But otherwise, yes, I think there is as much difference.

You know, Ive been reading for the first time a bit of Glyn Maxwell, whom I
like very much. I originally got his book because I read a terrific poem of his
called Dream but a Door. That poem and a great many of the other poems
Ive read so far seem to be in what I would call proper meter as opposed to
sloppy meter.
INTERVIEWER
In 1961 you published a book, My Sad Captains, in which this difference in
kind was acknowledged by the structure of the book and, except for your last
collection, youve followed that pattern ever since. However, in My Sad
Captains the nonmetrical section is in syllabics, not free verse. How did you
start writing in syllabics?
GUNN
I admired a lot of American poetry in free verse, but I couldnt write free
verse. The free verse I tried to write was chopped-up prose, and I could see
that was no good. Then I thought of ways in which I could learn how to write
in something that was not metrical, that did not have the tune of meter going
through it. Once youve got the tune in your head its very difficult to get it
out. Then somehow or other I heard about syllabics and discussed them a bit
with Winters, and I found a terrific example in some poems by Donald Hall
about Charlotte Corday. Donald Hall, as opposed to, lets say, Robert Bridges
or Marianne Moore, was not using a long syllabic line. His was a short line and
the great virtue of this for me was that it was not in what we understand as a
meter, which involves combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables. It
was virtually in free verse or prose, arranged in lines, but each line simply
depended on a mechanical count. I found the short line adaptable and
interesting. After a while, when I was writing in, for example, the sevensyllable line, which was my favorite, I found that I could recognize or could
think up a line of that length without counting the number of syllables. Id
check on ityes, there were sevenbut it had a kind of tune of its own. This
was interesting. Anyway, I was halfway to writing in free verse and then I did,
later on, in my next book, go into free verse itself. I dont think I have written
any syllabics since the poems in Misanthropos in Touch.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anything you could do in syllabics that you cant do in free verse?
GUNN
Im not sure. I must say Im quite pleased with the poem called My Sad
Captains. I think I hit on something there but its not something Ive been
able to repeat. Theres something going on there with the sounds that Im

amazed I was able to achieve. I dont think Ive ever done that in free verse. I
dont think I could do it in syllabics again. I certainly couldnt do it in meter
its not a metrical effect.
INTERVIEWER
Its sometimes struck me that, in syllabic verse, you get closer to prose than
you do in free verse.
GUNN
I dont know. It seems to me that a good deal of D. H. Lawrences free verse is
very close to prose. I like it for that. Some is more incantatory, some is more
biblical, but some of it is not. It depends which poet youre speaking about;
there are so many different kinds of free verse. Theres a different kind for
every poet using it in fact.
INTERVIEWER
As if each writer had to invent his or her own?
GUNN
Yes, though of course Pound invented several kinds. Williams invented one
kind in his youth and another kindI dont think so goodin his old age.
Stevens invented one amazingly subtle kind. Winters invented a kind all of his
own.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think yours is a different kind again?
GUNN
I try to make it so. I hope it is.
INTERVIEWER
But is there a principle that you follow?
GUNN
No, it just depends on my ear.
INTERVIEWER
Were about to touch on the point where form and content relate to one
another. When you look at My Sad Captains, its not just a formal difference
between the first and second halves of the book but a difference in the kind

of content.
GUNN
It seems to me that the freer formsand that includes syllabicsare
hospitable to improvisation or the feel of improvisation. Lawrence puts this
wonderfully in his famous essay Poetry of the Present. He speaks of free
verse as poetry of the presentthat is, it grabs in the details and these are
probably very casual details of the present, of whatever is floating through
the air, whatever is on the table at the time, whatever is underfoot, however
trivialtrivial but meaningful. Whereas metrical verse, he saysI think rightly
metrical verse has the greater finish, because in a sense it deals with
events or experience or thinking that are more finished. Finished in both
senses: in a punning sense, its also more over and done with. He calls it
poetry of the past. (He also calls it poetry of the future but Ive never
understood what he means by that.) But there is the idea of the completed
thought; there is what we nowadays call the idea of closure. So the freer
forms invite improvisation and are hospitable to the fragmentary details of
ones life, as opposed to the important completed thoughts and experiences
of ones life. The freer forms are less dramatic, I think, and more casual.
INTERVIEWER
Taking My Sad Captains as a whole, its a much more humanistic book than
the previous two.
GUNN
I was less of a fascist. I had been a Shakespearean, Sartrean fascist! I was
growing up a little; I wasnt quite so juvenile. I was very much influenced by
Sartre, as everybody realized and as I was not sorry for everybody to realize. I
was in quest of the heroic in the modern worldwhether I succeeded or not
and that was a slightly fascistic quest because the heroic is so often a martial
kind of virtue. Well, by the time I got to My Sad Captains I was growing up a
bit . . . I suppose I acknowledge other kinds of life in the first poem in the
book, In Santa Maria del Popolo, in that Im speaking about the old women
as well as the heroic gesture thats Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.
INTERVIEWER
I become very conscious in that book that religion is an option not open to
you.
GUNN
Im not very spiritual!

INTERVIEWER
Yes, but Im asking you about a quality of language, I think. There are certain
poems in the first part of My Sad Captains that ARE metaphysical in content.
They seem to invite inquiry into purpose and meaning in experience, yet the
possibility of purpose and meaning seems closed off for you. You know,
Purposeless matter hovers in the dark and so on.
GUNN
Oh I agree. Of course, this was somewhat different when I came to write
Moly, when I took LSD. LSD certainly extends your awareness into other
areas. Its chemicalit may be simply that youre not seeing round corners
but you just think you are. You tend to think that these other areas are
spiritualand they may be. Theres at least one poem, The Messenger, in
which I speak about angels: Is this man turning angel as he stares / At one
red flower . . .? I was playing with the idea. I dont think I was being
irresponsible. It is still a question, and its not a question that I answer in the
poem. The poem where I most overtly take up religious termsspiritual terms
would be betteris a poem called At the Centre, which I now think is rather
a pompous poem. This came out of my biggest acid trip. I took a colossal
amount and stood with my friend Don Doody on a roof from which you could
see the sign of a brewery that had on the top of it a magnificent image in
neon lights, even during the day, of a huge glass. The outline was
permanently there, but it would fill up and drain with yellow lights, as if it
were a filling-up glass of beer that would suddenly vanish and then fill up
again from the bottom. This of course became a fantastic image for . . .
existence itself! I think it comes into the poem with all the talk of flowing and
stuff. And there I was indeed having, in that experience, a rather defiant
conversation with a God who I did not believe existed! There was one very
funny thing that happened during that day. Ive only been able to admit it in
recent years. (This was about 1968.) At one point, in this grandiloquent way
that I had, I said to God, What does it all mean? Suddenlythis was a
genuine hallucinationwhat seemed like a plastic bubble of shit crossed the
sky. I did not admit this to my companion but I do remember saying, No, oh
no, not that. I do not want to believe that life is shit! And I rejected that
hallucination. But of course, the hallucination came from me in the first place.
Im not saying that the experiences in Moly were not genuine and I wouldnt
disown anything in Moly. In fact, I still think of it as my best book, though few
others have thought so. I think these experiences elicited my best poetry
from me.
INTERVIEWER
The last poem in Moly, Sunlight, is in form a kind of religious poemin a

way that At the Centre isnt. I mean, its a sort of hymn.

GUNN
And the sun is like a god. At the same time, I do say in the poem that it has
flaws and its all going to burn out one day. So Im qualifying it there.
INTERVIEWER
So its finite.
GUNN
Its finite, yes, but to take a line of Stevenss from Sunday Morning: Not as
a god, but as a god might be.
INTERVIEWER
The other thing in Moly, of course, is metamorphosis, and that reminds one of
paganism.
GUNN
Yes, well the whole theme of the book is metamorphosis. Almost every poem I
think. That was LSD, of course. It did make you into a different person. The
myths of metamorphosis had much more literal meaning for me: the idea
that somebody could grow horns, that somebody could turn into a laurel tree,
or that somebody could be a centaur (in the Tom-Dobbin poemsTom is me
of course), or turn into an angel. In the hallucinationsor more likely,
distortionsthat you saw under the influence of LSD, things did change their
shape. You know, you could see bumps on somebodys forehead perhapsI
never didbut thats the kind of thing you could see that might resemble
horns. You saw other possibilities.
INTERVIEWER
Was there also a literary source? Were you thinking of Ovid?
GUNN
Of course, yes. But I dont know if Id read Ovid yet. Where I first got the
myths was from Nathaniel Hawthornes two retellings of them in Tanglewood
Tales and A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls. Often when people think Im
deriving from Ovid, Im actually deriving from those books, which I read in my
childhood. But he got them from Ovid.
INTERVIEWER
Weve skated over your previous book, Touch. A lot of that was written during

a years visit to London, wasnt it?

GUNN
It wasnt actually. Ill tell you what I wrote on that years visit. I wrote a good
deal of Misanthropos, but it was about half written before I came. It was
certainly all sketched out, so I was in a sense filling in blanks. I also wrote
Confessions of the Life Artist and all of Positivesbut those are just
captions; those were easy.
INTERVIEWER
Theyre quite important though, arent they? Werent they your first poems in
free verse?
GUNN
I think they probably were, yes. I remember thinking to myself rather
pompously at the time that I was trying to adapt William Carlos Williams for
the Englishas if Charles Tomlinson had not been doing that for some years
before me! I had very great difficulty in the years when I was writing the
poems that went into Touch. There was a lot of time that went by when I just
wasnt able to write . . . I either couldnt write anything or I was writing poetry
that got printed but didnt ultimately seem good enough to put in the book. I
still wouldnt want to reprint them. They seem melodramatic or phony or
something.
INTERVIEWER
The book strikes me as transitional. Would you say it was because around
that timepossibly through coming to Londonyou were becoming more
decisively American than British? You lay yourself open to American
influences . . .
GUNN
I suppose thats right. How interesting! Yes. You know, people dont always
think of themselves that clearly, so I need someone like you to tell me this
kind of thing and I can assent to it. Im not being ironic when I say this. Its
just that we all know how difficult it is to stand back from ourselves and to
perceive the pattern in our own lives, which may be perfectly obvious to
other people. I do indeed think thats true. Yes.
INTERVIEWER
Was it difficult to accept that you could write that sort of open poetry?
GUNN

No, though change is always difficult. Its so true what youre saying. While I
was in England I wrote an essay about William Carlos Williams that later got
into my prose book The Occasions of Poetry. So I did a lot of reading of
Williams for that. And I discovered Snyder while I was here in England. I read
Riprap, which I found in Foyles bookshop in London. It had been out for four
or five years but I hadnt yet read it. Creeley I didnt like at that time. I had to
read more of him and eventually came to like him a very great deal. But he
didnt make sense for me somehow until Id read him more thoroughly.
INTERVIEWER
And Robert Duncan?
GUNN
Oh yes, and Duncan was all mixed up with my acquaintance with him of
course. The three writers who have influenced me personallyin a
combination of their work and their character, in other words through
friendshiphave been Yvor Winters, Christopher Isherwood, and Robert
Duncan. With two of those, Winters and Duncan, I was really just a listener. I
call myself a friend but I wasnt a friend in that there wasnt much
reciprocation between us. I dont think Winters or Duncan knew me very well.
Partly with Duncan because he talked so much! He talked all the time
fascinatinglyand didnt give you much time to answer. Or when you did
have a chance to answer it was about ten minutes too late. Duncan was
aware of this and was always making jokes against himself because of it. He
had one very funny story about Olson. He said, When I first met Olson, we
found there was an immediate problem, because he liked to talk all the time
and I liked to talk all the time, but we solved it at once by talking
simultaneously! But I dont think Duncan knew me very well. I was perfectly
happyI learned from him. Having lunch with him or spending an afternoon
with him was such an extraordinary experience. I would go away with my
head teeming with ideas and images and Id write them down in my notebook
and feel like writing poetry. I usually didnt and I didnt write Duncan-type
poetry in fact, but he was a tremendously fertilizing influence. He was that
kind of influence on everybody.
INTERVIEWER
Winters and Duncan, though, seems an extraordinary contrast.
GUNN
I have sometimes said to myself, I am the only person in the world ever to
have dedicated poems to both Winters and Duncan. They hated each other.
They didnt meet but they hated each other. When they referred to each

other it was with contempt, though I must say Duncan was a little more
respectful at times of Winters for his sheer consistency. Of course, as I said
before, Winters was what we would nowadays call homophobic.
INTERVIEWER
That seems not to have bothered you, though.
GUNN
Well, most people were homophobic; whole departments of English were! You
couldnt be honest then. Sometimes young people say to me, Why were you
in the closet in those days? I was in the closet because I would not only have
lost my job, Id have been kicked out of America and consequently would not
have been able to live with my lover. That was a very practical reason for my
behavior, dishonest though it may have been. I suppose there was even a
danger of going to prison at certain times, because the act of having sex with
another man was illegal in many states. So there was no question of my
being frank with Winters, though I think latterly he must have realized. He
certainly didnt at the period of our greatest contact. I didnt see that much of
him once I had left Stanford.
INTERVIEWER
Can we return to the contrast with Duncan?
GUNN
Yes. Winters tried to be a complete rationalist, though he was in fact a
tremendous romantic. Nobody would be that much of a rationalist unless they
were really romantic. Duncan was a joyful irrationalist, even liking to write
nonsyntactical sentences that could be looked at from each end! It could be
very irritatinglooked at from each end theyd have different meanings.
Suddenly the syntax can change . . .
INTERVIEWER
How do you think it is that you absorb such contrasts into your personality
without losing the coherence of your writing?
GUNN
Ive never had any trouble with that. When I was reading what they nowadays
call the canon of English literature to get a degree here at Cambridge, I had
no difficulty in reading Pope with appreciation and Keats with appreciation,
though they stood for completely different things. I, in a sense, read them as
living writers. They were living in that they were speaking directly to me. Im
aware of all thats wrong with reading unhistorically. Nevertheless, one does

read unhistorically. Primarily its Pope or Keats speaking to me, Thom Gunn. I
was aware that they would not have wanted to have anything to do with each
other, but I never had difficulty in reconciling people who were in themselves
irreconcilable. Im a very unprincipled person. People like to talk so much
about poetics now and theory. I dont have theory. I expect my practice could
be brought down to theory but Im not interested in doing that. Maybe if I
ever get famous enough somebody will do it for me!
INTERVIEWER
Can you summarize what you learned from Duncan? Theres a poem
dedicated to him in your next book, Jack Straws Castle.
GUNN
Its not the best example though. I think the poem where I used Duncan most
was The Menace. I put on different voices, I am somewhat dislocated . . .
His greatest poem he speaks of as a mosaic, A Poem Beginning with a Line
by Pindar. Actually its something like Pounds way of writingby
juxtaposition of fragments. The Menace is written in this way; there is free
verse, there is even kind of nursery-rhyme regular verse, there is prose, and
there is a freedom of form that I learned from him. Its deeper than just form,
of course. Put it this way: the main difference between Winters and Duncan
was that Winters was deliberately a poet of closure and Duncan deliberately a
poet of process. Duncan spoke of writing as a process in which, if you were a
good boy, things would come to you during the writing. The most interesting
parts. Of course theyre both right to some extent, but they were making
different emphases. I think in my practice I have become more interested in
this idea of writing as a process and being open to things happening to you
while youre writingI mean things coming out of your imagination.
INTERVIEWER
In the second half of your career you seem to have become preoccupied with
those ideas of openness and closure. Somewhere, talking about Moly, you
refer to definition and flow, which are analogous to closure and openness.
GUNN
They are analogous. I play with these notions particularly in a poem called
Duncan, which is about his death. The last lines of the poem recapitulate
the Venerable Bedes famous story about the sparrow flying through the
feasting hall. I see the hall as some barns are nowadays, with open gables at
each endthat is, both open and closed. It depends whether youre inside or
outside. Theyre inside a building, and Bedes analogy is that this is a mans
life. But if you see it under the aspects of eternityof the whole sky as being

what youre inthen youre never inside. Im playing with the notion of
insideness and outsideness.
INTERVIEWER
The subject of that poem, Duncan, is a writer who takes the view from the
outside, but the poem itself is in a strict traditional stanza form. Is that also
important, that not only are you preoccupied with openness and closure but
that you marry the two in different ways?
GUNN
Ive always been trying to, yes. Donald Davie once said that he wanted to
combine the influences in himself of Pound and Winters. I remember rather
sarcastically remarking in print that this was like trying to abide by the
principles of Hitler and Gandhi at the same time. But Donald was right! One
can do this kind of thing; if one believes in the validity of the different
poetries, then one can in some way marry or digest whatever is in them. Yes,
I feel very much at ease in metrical and rhyming forms. I feel a certain
freedom in them. I dont feel that they are constricting. I feel I can play tricks
with them that open them up.
INTERVIEWER
There are two moments in your relatively recent writing when you seem to
fall back on closure and on meter. One is in Moly and the other is in The Man
with Night Sweats, the elegiac poems about AIDS victims . . .
GUNN
I know why I did that in Moly. Ive spoken about it so often that Ill simply
summarize it by saying that I was trying to deal with what seemed like the
experience of the infinite, deliberately using a finite form in dealing with it
because I was afraid that it would not be dealt with at all in a form that also
partook of the nonfinite. I dont know why Ive been attracted to it recently.
Its not just with the AIDS poems. Its in the poems I was writing for about
four years before I started on any of those. The first of the AIDS poems was
Lament and thats in couplets. It just came to handit just seemed to me a
useful formbut it was also that because Id been writing in rhyme and meter
so much, so concentratedly, for the previous four years.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that writing Lament in couplets established that as the kind of
form you would use for the rest of them?
GUNN

Thats probably right.

INTERVIEWER
Lets go back to Jack Straws Castle. A lot of that book, particularly the title
poem, seems to me to represent the bad face of the Moly experience.
GUNN
That was deliberate. Much of Moly was about dreams; this was about
nightmares. Maybe I should explain who Jack Straw is. Theres one of many
songs that I like from the Grateful Dead called Jack Straw and I used to
wonder what an American could make of the phrase Jack Straw. Theres an
English pub called Jack Straws Castle and an English reader might know that
Straw was one of the leaders of the Peasants Revolt. But Americans couldnt
be expected to know that. So I looked Jack Straw up in the dictionary and
found that it means a worthless personlegally a man of straw, a person of
no account. Also I was reading Dante at the time, so lots of references to the
Inferno come in. There are heaps of literary references in that poem, but its
absolutely unnecessary for anybody to know. It was just fun doing them. The
kittens changing into the furies came from Through the Looking Glass, when
the kittens change into the Red Queen and the White Queen and so on.
Theres a bit from Kidnapped when David Balfours walking up some stairs
and suddenly theres a great gap. But yes, youre right, the drug dreams of
Moly have all gone sour in Jack Straw . . .
INTERVIEWER
I suppose I was trying to say that Jack Straws Castle feels less optimistic than
Moly. Also, Robert Wells was telling me that hed noticed in a lot of your
poems a preoccupation with sequences of rooms, with houses and cellars and
so on, which have a somewhat claustrophobic effect.
GUNN
Youd have to ask a shrink about that. Its a common-enough metaphor for a
persons body or a persons mind. Its like a house and there are rooms, there
are half-hidden rooms in it, there are attics where nobody ever goes . . . I
expect Freud speaks about it somewhere. You might almost say it was a
cultural metaphor rather than an individual one. I do dream a lot about
houses and about rooms, but Ive always assumed everybody did.
INTERVIEWER
Two other things happen in Jack Straws Castle that hadnt obviously
happened in your work before. One is that theres a series of poems which
are clearly autobiographical, in which youre looking back mainly on your

childhood and adolescence. The other is that its the book in which you come
out as a homosexual. I wondered if there was any connection between that
and the secret roomsyou know, the opening up.
GUNN
Probably, probably. In the following book I use it as a metaphor in a poem
called Talbot Road, where I speak about the canals that are there all over
London, but you never know theyre there unless you happen to be on the top
of a bustheyre hidden behind walls and fences mostly. Yes, its not
unconnected. Of course, I came out sexually because when everybody came
out sexually it became safe enough legally for the first time. In 1974 I was in
New York and there was the gay parade there. I didnt particularly want to go
on it, but I was staying with somebody who was going on it and who would
really have felt considerable contempt for me if I hadnt gone. I went on it so
that he would think well of me. I was delighted by it! I was walking along in it
and I kind of floated forward and backward a bit so I was sometimes walking
with my friend and sometimes not, and there was this wonderful little man
who looked like a bank clerk. He was wearing a suit and he said he was from
Hartford, Connecticut, and I thought, Yes, thats terrific. Thats what its all
about, isnt it? I was delighted by it. Or, as they nowadays say, empowered.
INTERVIEWER
But how did it then come into the poetry?
GUNN
I admitted it in, whereas formerly I had covered it over or disguised it or
excluded it. I was now able to include it. For one thing, if Id brought it in
when I first started to publish, I dont think periodicals or possibly even book
publishers would have found my work publishable. Things were that different
in 1954. It was good reasoning; it was not just cowardice. I mean, it was
cowardice as well, but there was good reason not to write openly. Only a few
very unusual people like Robert Duncan and Angus Wilson did write openly,
and even with Angus Wilson I think it was only implicitnobody could have
been that interested in gay behavior without being gay himself. So thats how
it happened. The end of Jack Straws Castle where Im in bed with a manit
would not have ended that way twenty years before. Id have found some
other way of dealing with it. Mind you, I never lied. I never wrote about a
woman as a disguise for a man, the way Tennessee Williams in a sense did in
his plays.
INTERVIEWER
So the women in Fighting Terms . . .

GUNN
The women in Fighting Terms were real women, yes. But I was guilty of using
the Audenesque you to cover both sexes, which is what I think Alan Sinfield
means when he speaks about universality, which we were always taught at
school was something we should be finding in our reading. Sinfield says that
when you use you Auden could say it was the universal you that could be
applied to anybody, but in fact we are going to think its a womanand
probably a white woman too! Its something I have a great distaste for, the
word universality. My attitude to it is slightly different from Alansor rather, I
come to a dislike of it through a different approach. Of course, this is
something I was taught at schoolthis is something my students were taught
at school. I started to have trouble with it when I would say to a student who
was reading, lets say, Othello, What value is this play to us? Why should you
be interested in Othello? And they would saya little too glibly, I thought
Oh, its universal! Well, one thing the situation of Othello is not is universal! In
his position as the black commander of a white army or in his marriage or in
his very dubious connection with Iago. Thats unique. I suppose one might
say that there are sentiments voiced in the play that could be universalized. I
mean, if we were in that positionthough I have certainly never felt jealousy
of that sort myselfwe could feel What oft was thought, but neer so well
expressed. But it seems to me that in a larger sense the idea of universality
depends on a notion of similarity. That is, people like Hamlet particularly
men like Hamlet; young men like Hamletbecause they identify with Hamlet,
because they are similar to Hamlet. But in my own experience, what I get
from reading is both similarity and dissimilarity, likeness and difference. I
think I probably read more for difference than I do for likeness. Appealing to
universality seems to obscure this, for me, rather important mixture. I
reached this conclusion quite independently and now I find that its a very
fashionable notion indeed! I find that all the critics nowadays are against
universalizing.
INTERVIEWER
Theres a review of The Passages of Joy by Donald Davie where he somewhat
recants on an earlier statement he had made in which he had praised you for
renouncing what he calls the glibly deprecating ironies of much modern
British poetry and going back to that phase of English in which the language
could register without embarrassment the frankly heroic. Hes talking about
the influence of Shakespeare and Marlowe on your work. But in this particular
review he suggests that something has happened to your poetry which
involves your sacrificing that rhetorical force. Its quite clear, though he
doesnt directly say so, that what he means is that by admitting to
homosexuality in your poems you have somehow given up a poetic
advantage.

GUNN
Yes. Im terrifically grateful for that essay and for everything Donald has
written about me. I think it has been consistently insightful. Nevertheless, his
particular point there is that coming into the open about homosexualitynot
being homosexual, but speaking about it openlyhas been a diminishing
force in my poetry. I dont see that at all and I dont quite understand how it
operates in his mind, as if the subject matter were so modern that there can
be no influence from any poet earlier than (I think he says) Whitman. Well,
there is Marlowe! There are others whom one knows were homosexual. There
are also most of Shakespeares sonnets. We dont know what Shakespeares
primary sexual preferences were, but he does rather more than take up the
subject. So its not without precedents. I dont agree with his main
assumption there. Nevertheless, hes got a right to his evaluation of that
particular book. Its true that theres probably more free verse in that book
and, if were dealing with traditions, the tradition of free verse doesnt go
back very far. So when Im writing free verse Im writing in a comparatively
modern tradition. He connects the two in a way that I think is wrong, but he
does it very intelligently. I dont think hell any longer be able to make that
connection in light of The Man with Night Sweats. Let me say that I also
respect Donald so much that something that was in my mind the whole time I
was writing this new book was how can I show him that hes wrong?
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if I can play devils advocate at this point? Take an early poem of
yours, The Allegory of the Wolf Boy from The Sense of Movement. It seems
to me very clear nowthough it wasnt when I first read itthat that poem is
about being a homosexual.
GUNN
Indeed it is.
INTERVIEWER
The poem is, to use Davies word, resonant. Its almost as if the not-owningup is precisely what makes it so resonant. I suppose this is related to what
weve just been saying about the universalthat from the particular
experience of being homosexual, it seems to establish resonances which all
of us can feel as human beings.
GUNN
Theres no real answer to this. I think you probably overvalue that poem a bit,
but Ill admit your general point that sometimes strategies of evasionthat
does sound very 1990s, doesnt it?may contribute to what makes a poem

successful. In fact, whatever you have going, including the obstacles,

contribute to the making of a poem, even the obstacle of having to write with
some baby yelling in the next room or something like that. That kind of very
obvious difficulty is something you may have to overcome and it may end
with some benefit to the poem. Id go further and say that one of the things
that makes for good writing is getting to a certain point and getting stuck in
the elucidation of an idea or whatever youre writing aboutthe description
of a thing, some imagery, or even choosing a wordand you have to stop
and think maybe for weeks. That very likely may be a strength in the poem.
But it doesnt mean that you have to invite obstacles. If you did that you
could invite them so successfully that youd never write a poem. There are
always plenty of obstacles in writing, and I dont think that being honest
about ones sexuality is something to be avoided because the need for
evasion is a useful obstacle.
INTERVIEWER
Theres a splendid phrase on the blurb of one of your books that comes from
a review by Frank Kermode. He calls you a chaste and powerful modern
poet. You said earlier on that your poems were moral evaluations of a life
some people would find immoral. Theres something paradoxical here. What
is it in your language that invites such a word as chaste?
GUNN
I cant really comment on that because I dont know what the principles are
that make me choose one word rather than another. I choose a word that
seems to me more appropriate, more meaningful. But we all do that, dont
we? And we end up with different styles. I do know that, extremely
unfashionably, I admire the qualities of somebody like Isherwoodof what I
would call a transparent style. Now the word transparent, as you know, is
much frowned on by most critics nowadays. They dont like that at all. I love
it! I think thats what its all about. I certainly think thats what I want it to be
about. Obviously I want more than clarity. Im raising questions all the way
with each of these words, with each questionable abstraction! But you see
what I mean? Im aiming to get throughmost of the timeon a first reading
if possible. I do not want to be an obscure poet. I do not want even to be as
obscure a poet as Lowell, though I may often be so. Thats in no sense a
derogatory comment on Lowell; hes just a little more difficult at times than I
am.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean exactly by transparency?
GUNN

Transparent to my meaning. Of course there is an implied contradiction with

what I was saying before about poetry as process. Theres the whole question
raised of how much meaning you have before you sit down to write and how
it gets altered in the process of writing. But you do start with some
knowledge of what youre going to say after all. It may well not be what you
end up saying, but it often is related to what you say. Yes, transparent . . .as
though youre looking through a glass at an object. Thats what the word
implies. So the words are the glass to my mind. My mind is the fish in the
tank behind the glass.
INTERVIEWER
Isnt it also that you want a style that allows something to come into the
poem which has nothing to do with you? You want the world in the poem. You
dont want just Thom Gunn in it.
GUNN
Oh, indeed, yes. I see what youre saying; its not just the fish but its all
behind the fish as well.
INTERVIEWER
One of the things that happens in The Passages of Joy is that there are lots of
other people in the bookthere, as far as I can see, for their own sake.
GUNN
I liked the idea of a populated book. Ive always liked the idea of a book of
poems as a kind of . . . if not a world, a country in a world. One of my
impulses in writing is the desire to possess my experience and to possess all
my experiencesmy funny and trivial experiences too. I like to bring in
people on the street. I was thinking that if the romantics had effusions and
certain of the modernists had observationsPrufrock and Other
Observations, Marianne Moores book Observationswhat Im trying to do is
record. Im recording the past, Im also recording the present, and Im
recording the world around me and the things that go through my mind. One
of the things I want to record is the street, because the streets that I move
through are part of my life that I enjoy and want to possess. I dont any
longer think of a poem as loot, but I do think of it as in some sense
possessing something.
INTERVIEWER
The streets are very much San Francisco streets, arent theyparticularly in
the last few books?

GUNN
Increasingly, yes. This started with Touch, though. There are bits of San
Francisco in Touchyou know, Pierce Street, Taylor Street, The Produce
District. And probably more with each book. It thrilled me to write a litany of
names in Night Taxi, the last poem in The Passages of Joy. There are two
lines where I take four extreme points in the city: China Basin to Twin Peaks,
Harrison Street to the Ocean. I loved doing that. Its pure litany; its not
meaningful. But it gave me a feeling of possession or achievementto have
found a place for those names.
INTERVIEWER
This is terribly surprising for an expatriate really, but it makes you almost a
regional poet, like Thomas Hardy in Wessex Heights. Its almost as if youd
invented roots for yourself.
GUNN
I have invented roots. There must be some kind of seaweed thats rooted in
one place and then floats to another place and puts down the same roots!
INTERVIEWER
The other great theme in The Passages of Joy is friendship.
GUNN
That was quite self-conscious too. It must be the greatest value in my life.
This is not a literary influence, though I admire Ben Jonson very much and he
likes to write about friendship. I write about love; I write about friendship.
Unlike Proust, I think that love and friendship are part of the same spectrum.
Proust says that they are absolutely incompatible. I find that they are
absolutely intertwined.
INTERVIEWER
Has AIDS had a fundamental effect on your poetry?
GUNN
Anything as big as that must have had some fundamental effect, but I cant
measure it and Im not sure what it would be. Ive had to attend at the
deathbeds of quite a few friends. On the other hand, what Im especially
focusing on is not the kind of death they had. What most of these poems
have in common as a subject is the way people face death. Its not the only
thing Im writing about in them but it seems to be one of the main things.

INTERVIEWER
Take The Man with Night Sweats itself. You have the image of the flesh as a
shield in that and it reminds me of things you said when you were young and
were writing about soldiers. Its as if the invasion of this virus has called into
question a lot of assumptions that your poetry had been built on up till then.
GUNN
I suspect the word shield is something of a dead metaphor as I use it there,
but it certainly calls into question the whole concept of taking risks. The same
is true of the following poem, In Time of Plague. Im not much of a risktaker myself but Ive always found the taking of risks rather admirable in a
wonderful and showy kind of way. And thats exactly one of the things one
cant do any longer in ones sexual behavior because taking risks can have
mortal consequences now. The worst consequence before would have been a
completely curable diseasesince the invention of penicillin after all. It was a
fruitful kind of risk. Im also implying what we know about even children
taking risks. Children take risks in their games that ultimately strengthen
their bodies. So theres a kind of pattern in our knowledge that active
behavior is sometimes a bit physically risky. You know when you go swimming
you could drown. But that is ultimately a strengthening thing and suddenly it
isnt any longer. This is something that those two poems have in common
they had to go together in the book, though I dont think I wrote them
together.
INTERVIEWER
In Time of Plague takes it a bit further . . .
GUNN
That poem is absolutely true. I changed the names.
INTERVIEWER
In that poem the love of risk is also a love of death, isnt it?
GUNN
Yes, and I say I know it, and do not know it, and They know it, and do not
know it. We know several things at once, and we also dont know each of
them. We also sometimes act as if we didnt know.
INTERVIEWER
Another theme, which seems to have grown through your work and which
flourishes in a special way in The Man with Night Sweats is the theme of

dereliction. There are a lot of tramps in the book . . .

GUNN
Ive always been interested in the life of the street. I suppose its always
seemed to me like a kind of recklessness, a freedom after the confinement of
the home or the family. This goes way, way back to my teens even. There
was a poem which started with the words Down and out, that being (I
thought romantically) a kind of freedom. In my second book there is a poem
called In Praise of Cities where I play with this idea in a rather Baudelairean
kind of way. There is the promiscuity of the streets, which can hold promise of
a sexual promiscuity as well, which is exciting. I love streets. I could stand on
the street and look at people all day in the same way that Wordsworth could
walk around the lakes and look at those things all day. As soon as Reagan
pushed the nutcases out on to the street in California, turning them back to
the community, which means turning them out on to the streets in fact, the
composition of the people on the streets began to change a good deal. So I
wrote about that. Theres a funny case in my recent book where I wrote about
a character I call Old Megafter Keats, who was writing after Scottand I
found that at about the same time my friend August Kleinzahler, who lives a
few blocks away from me, had written about (we concluded) the same
person. He called her Mrs. B, which says something about the difference
between him and me, I suppose. I make a rather literary antecedent and he
makes up a name.
INTERVIEWER
Do you suffer badly from writers block?
GUNN
Well, everybody does, I suppose. Or there are very few writers who dont.
Even Duncan, who I thought wrote continuously and easilythere were two
years when he didnt write anything. There are certain times when you are
absolutely sterile; that is, when words seem to mean nothing. The words are
there, the things in the world are there, you are interested in things in the
same way and theoretically you can think up subjects for poems, but you
simply cant write. You can sit down at your notebook with a good idea for a
poem and nothing will come. Its as though there is a kind of light missing
from the world. Its a wordless world and its somehow an empty and rather
sterile world. I dont know what causes this but its very painful.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that the periods of fecundity are in any way related to these dry
periods?

GUNN
It might be that you have to go through dry periods so as in a sense to store
things up. Maybe its like a pregnancy. Sometimes I think it is and sometimes
I dont. Itd be very nice to get up every day and write a new poem. Im sure
every poet would like to do that, but its not possible. It may be that youve
had some imaginative experience thats going to become a poem and it just
has to become more a part of you. It has to stew, it has to cook until its
ready, and maybe theres nothing else to write about in between. Youve just
got to cook away until its ready to be taken out of the oven.
INTERVIEWER
T. S. Eliot, when he was interviewed for The Paris Review, was asked whether
he thought his poetry belonged to the tradition of American rather than
British literature. I wonder if I can put the same question to you in reverse?
GUNN
I call myself an Anglo-American poet. If its a question of the poets I admire,
theres a tremendous number of both British and American poets whom I
admire greatly. I think Im a weird product of both. Im not like the other
products, but then were none of us like each other. Most American poets at
least know all the British poets and theres some kind of a relation there.
Probably thats a little less true of British poets, though theyre pretty wellread in the American modernists and probably Whitman and Dickinson as
well. So Im not sure that its any longer a particularly meaningful question.
INTERVIEWER
What do you feel about the situation of poetry in the English language at the
moment?
GUNN
Theres always a lot to be unhappy with at any time. We look back on the
best of the romantics or the Elizabethans or any period. We dont remember
that there was an incredible amount of junk being written too. The
Elizabethans seem so good, and there are so many good ones. There were
also very many bad ones. At times it seems to me that all the giants have
died, but maybe it always seems like that. People like Eliot and Pound and
Stevens and Williams and even Yeats were around for part of my lifeI
suppose I was already reading a bit of poetry at the age of ten, which was
when Yeats died. Then the following generation died early. Crane died very
early and Winters didnt exactly live into old age. People like Lowell and
Berryman destroyed themselves in various ways. But there are a great many
youngish poets or poets of my own generation whom I enjoy reading very

much and find exciting and like to explore. If I mention a few names, these
are no surprise to anybody because Ive written about them. In America I very
much admire Jim Powell and August Kleinzahler. In Britain Id like to mention
the present interviewer! And I like Robert Wellss poetry a great deal and Tony
Harrisons and there are younger people. I mentioned Glyn Maxwell, whom
Im reading right now and who strikes me as very energetic and wonderfully
crazy in a really good kind of way. And then there are surprises, of course, like
W. S. Graham. I discounted him for so many years. I thought he was just an
imitator of Dylan Thomasand he probably was at first. But meanwhile he
was creeping up from behind and when we all rediscovered him something
like twelve years ago that was quite a revelation. Of course Basil Bunting only
died the other day and he was a giant. So this isnt altogether a bad time to
be living. Ive no idea what the time looks likehow it measures up against
other times or even what its shaped likewho the big ones are and who the
small ones. Id just rather follow my personal interests and enthusiasms.
Author photograph by Dorothy Alexander.

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Archibald MacLeish, The Art of Poetry No. 18

Interviewed by Benjamin DeMott ISSUE 58, SUMMER 1974

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, CA. 1944

Archibald MacLeish winters in Antigua, but the bearable portion of the year
finds him at Uphill Farm, a country place in Conway, Massachusetts, bought in
the twenties on the MacLeishes return from Europe. The region has meaning
for him because his Connecticut Yankee mothers family, the Hillards, knew
these hills well. His Hillard grandfather was a Congregational minister who
worked his way north up the Connecticut River in the years of the Civil War,
fighting with his deaconsmany of whom were Copperheadsand finally
ending his journey in the 1880s when he crossed the Massachusetts state line
and eventually settled in Conway itself. The poet greets his guests in
countryman clothesfine confident head, a manner of kindly commandand
leads the way to the pool. The impression everywheresharpest in
MacLeishs style of talk, but no less evident in the domestic arrangementsis
of a world well managed. MacLeish is a short man with bearingpowerful
shoulders give good drive to his crawl in the pool. There are drinks outside,
souffl, salad, and Riesling in a dining room with a mountain view, and some
jokes with Mrs. MacLeish, whose voice Joyce praised, about certain of her
husbands poems making her out to be U.S. Champion Homemaker and
Breadbaker and omitting she sings Poulenc. MacLeish laughs hardest at
himself and his wife takes back her complaint charmingly: I never minded at
all. Thereafter a descent down stone stairs to the music roompast a wall of
framed honorary degrees, pictures of treasured friends (Felix Frankfurter, for
one), a huge photo of the moon. The poet speaks graciously of his hope that
someday therell be a conversation, not just a tape, and then its time to
work.

INTERVIEWER
Can we start outside the gates and work in? Youre seen as a writer with
unusual experience of the public worldperhaps as a public man. Is A.
MacLeish as a public man recognizable to you?
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
No, but Ive had him pointed out to me. I suppose all writers have that
experience sooner or laterthe double personalitythe other youre
supposed to be and cant remember ever having met. Except that in this case
the problem is complicated by the fact that those who see me as a public
man dont always mean it kindly. There are those on the fringes of the art

who think that poetry and the public world should be mutually exclusiveas
though poets were the internists of the profession and should stick to their
bowels. Ive been hearing from them for some time. After my tour of public
duty during the Second World War, I published a poem called Actfive, which
was a kind of report on the look and feel of things out there. Random House
published it, and before it appeared Bob Linscott, then an editor at Random
House, warned me that I was to be disciplined as a renegade. I didnt believe
him, but so it turned out. There were no reviews. There were even letters to
the Times about there being no reviews.
INTERVIEWER
The silence meant somebody thought the public man thing had violated the
poet?
MACLEISH
Something like that. Though the poem itself, if they had read it, wouldnt
have given them much comfort. I suppose it is now the most frequently
reprintedquoted fromof my books. No, it was the usual ideological
nonsense: the usual nonsense to which ideology leads unthinking meneven
unthinking critics. I dont know how it was with Terence, to whom nothing
human was indifferent, but I do know how it is with the practice of the art of
poetry. You cant cut off a part of human life by critical fiat and expect your
poets to be whole. Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive and
a poet isnt alive by quarter-acres or front feet. Hes alive as a man. With a
world to live in. No poet down to very recent timesnot even the privatest,
the most confessionalever doubted that. And the greatest of recent poets is
the most convincing proof that the old poets were right. It was when Yeats
broke through the fences around the Lake Isle of Innisfree and took to ranging
the public world of Ireland that he became what he became. Discovering his
time he discovered himself. And what was true for Yeats in 1914 is even truer
for us in the angry and bewildered world we live in. Take away a poets public
life by critical edict in a time like ours and what do you leave him? Not,
certainly, himself.
INTERVIEWER
But staying in touch with the whole self is tough work, isnt it, if youre trying
to make reasonable words in the media about Apollo 8 or the Pentagon
Papers? You dont feel squeezed?
MACLEISH
Tougher, you mean, than keeping in touch with the whole self when youre
writing about a private part of your experience? It isnt the subject that

betrays a writer, but the way he takes the subject. Rhetoric, in the bad sense
of that abused word, is just as bad in confessional writing as it is out in the
open air. What matters in either case is the truth of the feelingthe feel of
the truth. If you can break through the confusion of words about a political
crisis like the Pentagon Papers to the human factsuch as the human reality
of an attorney generals behavioryou have written the experience. And the
fact that the writing appears in The New York Times wont change that fact
for better or worse. Journalism also has its usesand to poets as well as to
journalists. You spoke of the Apollo flightthe first circumnavigation of the
moonthe one that produced that now familiar, but still miraculous,
photograph of the earth seen off beyond the threshold of the moon . . . small
and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats. This was one of
the great revolutionary moments of the human consciousness, but the
moment was not explicit in the photograph nor in the newspaper accounts of
the voyage. Only the imagination could recognize itmake imaginative sense
of it. Are we seriously to be told that the imagination has no role to play here
because the event is in the newspapers? Or is it the publication in the
newspapers of the imaginative labor which offends?
INTERVIEWER
The way the writer takes the subjectthat depends a lot on what the writer
knows about it, right? How far around and in hes been? Can I ask about the
uses of public range, social reference, all that? Is there a way of getting
beyond the clich about the value of the experience, saying something true
about how general knowledge ought to sit in a writer?
MACLEISH
I dont know that anything as essential as experience can ever be a clich,
even when parroted in the way you mean. You have to live to write in more
senses than one, and no one can ever live enoughthere will always be
cracks in the knowledge and they will always show. But we have been talking
about this rather factitious distinction between the public world and the
private world, and that does raise the question of knowledge of the public
world. Well, there is one thing you can say about that, because poetry has
said it over and over from the first beginnings. One of the dimensions of great
poetryone of the dimensions by which poetry becomes greatis precisely
the public dimension: that vast landscape off beyondthe human
background, total human backgroundwhat we call the world. It is there in
Shakespeare: Even in Hamlet, the most inward of the great plays, Denmark is
behind the scenebeyond the garden where the king is murdered. And so
too, obviously, of Dante: Dantes Hell is under Italyactual Italy, historic Italy.
As Homers Troy, Homers Aegean, contains the poems. So Tu Fus China. So
the Thebes of Oedipus. Oedipus Rex is, I suppose, by common agreement one

of the keys to the secret human heart, but what would the play be without
Thebes?
The Greeks regarded what we call public experience as part of human
experience. Thats what a man was: He was a member of his city. And if he
was a poet he was a poet who was a member of his city. This is what gives
such ground and scope and humanity to Greek poetry at its greatest. The
Greek poets knew what a city was to themwhat a war was, a people. They
knew. Compare them with Pound. I have great admiration for Pound: He is
aware of the city, of the well-ordered state, of the long traditionthe
enduring ethic. But he doesnt know. He hasnt been there. And it shows. Carl
Sandburg was one of the few contemporary poets who was able to take the
state in his stride. Perhaps he took it in too easy a stride: Edmund Wilson
thought soyou remember his contemptuous dismissal. But Carl will have
the last word there. This is perhaps one way of answering the question: that a
man who excludes, who reallynot perhaps willfully or explicitly but by
subconscious habit, by conforming unthinkingly to the current fashion
excludes the public part of his experience is apt to end up finding himself
excluded. We talk about the play within the play: there is also a play without
the playwhich contains everything.
INTERVIEWER
What about the question of work life and art lifesay in Stevens? Poetry
here, business there. Arent we headed into a time when theres a demand
that a writer get himself wholly togethermean it across the board? Hell be
hung for fraud if he finds a condition of marginality acceptable for poetry.
MACLEISH
Wallace Stevens meant it: the fact that he had a living to earn affected that
no more than it affected Shakespeare. Stevens was the head, as I understood
it, of the whole trial operation of the Hartford Accident, with lawyers all over
the country trying cases for him. He tried very few cases himself, but he
oversaw the trying of cases and was helpful and very intelligent, a good
lawyer and useful and a well-paid officer of the Hartford Accident. I think very
well paid. In other words, his life, his professional life, what you called his
work-life, was successful. His poetry was something else. The trying of cases,
the defending of who ran over a child and so forth, never, as such, enters his
poetry. It might have if he had had a little streak of Masters in him. It might
have, but it didnt. His metaphysical mind escapedand escaped is the right
wordescaped out of Hartford Accident into those deeper and deeper
examinations of the metaphysical universe. So that the question with Stevens
isnt really a question of public against private because his business life was
private also. I dont think he was ever interested in a political question in his

life. I never heard him mention one. But he is perfect exampleperhaps the
most successful and admirable exampleof a man who made a go of poetry
and business. Your word is the right one. Poetry and business in the modern
world. I never made a go of it. I tried everything from the law through
journalism and government service to teaching at Harvard, and for each one I
had to pay a price. Stevens made the art and the work go together. He fitted
them together. He had, as you say, carefully planned work habits. Does this
have anything to do with the marginality of poetry in contemporary life? I
dont think so. I think it has to do with the marginality of poetry in
Stevenss life. In terms of the hours of his life, poetry was necessarily pushed
to the margin. But in the margin it was his life. And it was superb poetry. Not
in a relative sense: superb as poetry. Nothing else matters. Nothing matters
with any man but the work. The rest is biography.
INTERVIEWER
Every man his own margin maker, is that it? I mean, every poet . . .
MACLEISH
We look back at Mr. W. S. and we say to ourselves, well, we dont know much
about him. We know he was an actor. Anyway, he supported himself
somehow or other in the theater. Shall we say the theater makes poetry
marginal except when Mr. W. S. practices it? Shall we make a distinction
between a poet supported by patrons (or, in the contemporary world, by
poetry audiences) and a poet who supports himself? Is the second marginal
whereas the first isnt? Because the first is free to devote all his time to
writing? But is he? He usually has to please his patron and that can be fairly
time-consuming. The truth is that neither you nor I have ever known a poet
who wasnt more or less in that situationwho wasnt with the left hand
trying to store up enough birdseed so he could go on with the right hand and
write some poetry.
INTERVIEWER
Marginal or not, the theater is a cooperative enterprise. It forces the writer
into a public situation. How do you feel about losing control? Is that a special
hell?
MACLEISH
It could be, I suppose. I have had two very different approaches to Broadway
production. In the first I had no intention of a Broadway production whatever.
I wrote J. B. because I had a theme that wouldnt leave me alone. I knew that
it had to be a verse play and that was about all I knew to begin with. So I
wrote it as a verse play and published the first part of it in the Saturday

Review and the finished poem with my publishers, Houghton Mifflin. I thought
that was the end of it. It never occurred to me that anybody would want to
produce it. Then Curt Canfield, who was dean of the Yale Drama School, said
he wanted to produce it at Yale. I said, Fine, great. No changes of any kind
except some cuts for length. Don Oenschlager designed the setvery
handsomeand Curt directed with student actors and we opened. Brooks
Atkinson came up to see it and reviewed it in the Times, and the next
morning nine producers were on the telephone. Alfred de Liagre Jr., with more
courage, I thought, than sound sense, took it on and he interested Gadge
Kazan, who was the great director of the generation. Gadge came up here
during the summer and he and I spent weeks in this room going over and
over the play. Still very little rewritingalmost none. Things for purposes of
stage continuity. The real problems occurred during tryout in Washington. In
other words, I was deep in a Broadway production before I rightly realized
that I was headed for Broadway. It was in Washington we discovered that we
had no endthat the end of the play had to be reconceived. But even then
I did not lose control of the play. By this time Gadge and I were closer than
brotherscommunicated almost without words. We both knew the end was
wrong, but what to do about it was my problem. So I rewrote the end of the
play and rewrote it and rewrote it, and was very unhappy about it. And then
we opened in New York. The publicity people were in a terrible situation. They
had a verse play on a Biblical theme on their hands. And as if that wasnt
enough, the newspapers were struck, so that everything was against us. Well,
what happened was that we ran on Broadway for a year.
INTERVIEWER
And werent ground up in a machine.
MACLEISH
Nor was I in the second Broadway play, Scratch, though Scratch was a
Broadway project from the start. By which I mean that it began not with a
play but with a producer. Stuart Ostrow wanted to make a musical out of
Steve Bents short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, with Bob Dylan
and me as the concocters. I had little interest in that, and less and less the
more I heard of it, but eventually I became excited about a straight play
based on Steves story, or what lay behind it, and Ostrow, when he read the
first draft, gave up the idea of the musical. Scratch, in other words, was
written not only for the Broadway stage, but practically on the Broadway
stage. And yet, even so, I never felt I had lost control. It was a joint
undertaking certainlyproducer, director, actors, playwrightbut the theme
was mine from the start and the words were always minethe play.
But if I were to generalize about this, I think Id say J. B. was right and Scratch

was wrongwrong I mean for me. For a man who is primarily not a
playwright, not a theater hand, to start out on Broadway is probably a
mistake, Broadway being what it has become in the last ten years. If I were
ever to write a play againwhich I wontId start with a play as I did in J. B.,
get it produced, if I could, in one of the fine repertory theaters outside New
York, and keep it outside until it was ready for the buzzards.
INTERVIEWER
That implies self-restraint. Where do you buy it in a culture that teaches
writers they personally matter? Can you say anything about that?
MACLEISH
I dont know if there is anything I can say about it, but by God something
ought to be said. Let me begin with two people whom I knew, one very well
and one quite well: Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. The tragedyand
it is a tragedyof Hemingways fame is that his life and his dramatization of
himself have been built up, not by him, or let me say, not altogether by him,
to such a point that the myth of the man is more important than the
achievementthe work. And the same thing is true of Scott, Scott having
done less about dramatizing himself, but having had more done for him. In
each case the literary figurecapital L, capital Fhas been so blown up,
so exaggerated, that the work has been diminished. You would know better
than I how permanently, but in any case damage has been done. And the
same thing is true of Robert Frost. Robert was himself the villain there,
because, as anybody who knew him knows, he worked very hard at his own
reputation even when he had no need towhen his greatness was
acknowledged. This was damaging only to him. But the real question is what
you do about this sort of thing. I dont know that pontificating about it does
any good. My own conviction is that the literary person as such just doesnt
countdoesnt matter. Some are interesting and some are dull. The only
thing that matters is the work. And the amplification of the amplifying device,
which is the man himself, is not good for the art of writing, is not good for the
writer, is not good. Ernest used to love to come up and go to the nightclubs in
New York. Why? To be recognized? But, for Gods sake, he had been
recognized in better ways before. I am not throwing off on Ernest. He is still
the great prose stylist of the century. But if ever there was a cult of
personality . . .! Well, the one thing a young writer ought to swear to on his
sword never to do is never to dramatize himself, whatever he may want to do
about his work.
INTERVIEWER
What are the other dangers a writer might be wise to look out for?

MACLEISH
Innumerable, of course, like all the ills humanity is heir to, but selfdramatization will stand for a lot of them. The essential is not to think of
ones self as a writer and to do nothing which will put ones self in that
popinjay attitude. You dont write as a writer, you write as a mana man with
a certain hard-earned skill in the use of words, a particular, and particularly
naked, consciousness of human life, of the human tragedy and triumpha
man who is moved by human life, who cannot take it for granted. Donne was
speaking of all this when he told his congregation not to ask for whom the
bell tolls. His learned listeners thought he was speaking as a divineas a
stoic. He was speaking from his poets heart: He meant that when he heard
the bell he died. Its all in Keatss lettersthat writers bible which every
young man or woman with this most dangerous of lives before him should be
set to read. Keats is already a poet in these lettershe is certain, in spite of
the reviewers, that he will be among the English poets at his death. But they
are not the letters of a poet. They are the letters of a boy, a young man, who
will write great poems. Who never postures. Who laughs at himself and who,
when he holds his dying brother in his arms, thinks of his dying brother, not
the pathos of the scene. You can put it down, I think, as gospel that a selfadvertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer. Why do anonymous
writers speak to us most directly? Why are the old, old writersthe old
Chinese and the vanished Greeksmost truly ours?
INTERVIEWER
What about the company a writer does keep. Does it matter?
MACLEISH
I dont suppose anything matters more. The subject of art is life. You learn life
by living it. And you dont live it aloneeven on Walden Pondas Walden
proves on every page. You live it with and by peopleyourself in your relation
with people, with and by living things, yourself in your relation to living
things. The mistake is Scott Fitzgeralds mistake, for exampleto lump all this
as something called experience and to put yourself outside it looking in like
a kind of glorified journalist of the ultimate reality. Scott dancing around the
dance floor beside a couple of pederasts, asking them intimate questions, as
though the answers would be answers. Ernests urgent feeling that he had to
know all sorts and kinds, as though he were still a reporter for the Kansas City
Star. What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can
know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see
into the mirror of the others is by love or its oppositeby profound emotion.
Certainly not by curiosityby dancing around asking, looking, making notes.
You have to live relationships to know. Which is why a lifetime marriage with a

woman you love is a great gift, and five marriages in a raddled row is a
disaster to everyone, including the marrier. The great luckthe
immeasurable luckfor a man trying to write the poem of his life is to have
known good men and women and to have loved them well enough to learn
the differences from himself. It wont guarantee the poem will get written but
it is immeasurable luck. A Jim Agee. A B. Hand. A Mark Van Doren. Felix
Frankfurter. Jack Bate. Mac Bundy. Carl Sandburg. Dean Acheson . . . my wife.
INTERVIEWER
What about writers as friends? Easy friends, I mean. Can the relation be other
than competitive? I remember your story about traveling out to Montana
when Hemingway had that car accident.
MACLEISH
You mean Hemingways remark that I had come out to watch him die? You
cant generalize from Hemingway. He knew Id come at considerable cost and
inconvenience (travel on Northwest Airlines in those days was anything but a
pleasure), and it embarrassed him. Also, he had grown his first beardthe
first I saw, anywayand looked like anything but a dying man; Pauline had to
fight the nurses out of the room. But to answer your question . . . my own
observation had been that writers can be easy friends and often arebut
not as writers. Mark Van Doren and I are the easiest of friends. Hemingway
and I were friendsclose friends, I wont lean on the easyfrom 24 or 25
until along in the thirties. Dos was a close friend always. So was John Peale
Bishop. But these werearehuman friendships, friendships between men,
not literary friendships. Reading Scott Fitzgeralds letters to Ernest is
illuminating in this connection: you see at once what was wrong with that
friendship. Scott writes as a writer. And in friendship, in human relations, in
life, there is no such thing as a writer: there is merely a man who sometimes
writes. I cant imagine anything shallower than a friendship based on a
common interest in the production of literature. Look at those letters of
Scotts! They throw light on Scotts novels, sure, but on the relation of two
remarkable men . . .?
INTERVIEWER
What are the prices? What are the necessary disciplines of writing?
MACLEISH
The first discipline is the realization that there is a disciplinethat all art
begins and ends with discipline, that any art is first and foremost a craft. We
have gone far enough on the road to self-indulgence now to know that. The
man who announces to the world that he is going to do his thing is like the

amateur on the high-diving platform who flings himself into the void shouting
at the judges that he is going to do whatever comes naturally. He will land on
his ass. Naturally. Youd think, to listen to the loudspeakers that surround us,
that no man had ever tried to do his thing before. Every poet worth reading
has, but those really worth reading have understood that to do your thing you
have to learn first what your thing is and second how to go about doing it.
The first is learned by the difficult labor of living, the second by the endless
discipline of writing and rewriting and rerewriting. There are no shortcuts.
Young writers a while back, misreading Bill Williams, decided to ignore the
fact that poems are made of words as sounds as well as of words as signs
decided not to learn the art of words as sounds, not to be bothered with it.
They were not interested in poems. They were interested in doing their thing.
They didand that was that.
INTERVIEWER
Who do you read now? Who counts?
MACLEISH
Read for pleasure or read from necessity? I suppose I read for pleasure as
everyone else doeswhat comes along. Whats new, as Ezra used to say.
(Not much is what it says it is, but one always hopes.) But necessity is
something else. You have to read in order to write, no matter what you
pretend to yourself. Art is a seamless web, and we all latch into it where we
find a loose end. But the problem is to find the connection. And hence the
necessity. What astonishes me about myself is that my necessities havent
changed over fifty years. You would think theyd have to in a time like this,
but they dont. Robert Frost is out of fashionor so they tell mebut fashion
is irrelevant: Robert is still what he always was, and still necessary to me. So,
even more, is Yeats. So is Perse. So is Pound. Eliot. That particular, unique,
and irreplaceable tonetimbreof Carl Sandburg. And back of the men of my
own time the necessity leads by the same curiousoh, it is curious enough
path: Hopkins, Rilke, Rimbaud, Emily, Emerson, Keats, Milton, Donne, and so
to the great inland ocean of Shakespeare and back of that to Chaucer and
Dante and the Greeks and off around the world to Li Po and Tu Fu. No pattern
I or anyone else can see, but all of it somehow making a wholeall of it
necessary. Necessary as bread. More than breadwater. Still. Fifty years later.
INTERVIEWER
Fifty years ago means the twenties. You have reason to remember the
twenties; why does everyone else want to? Why all this nagging of that time?
MACLEISH

No idea. From any point of view, the decade of the twenties was a terrible
decade: It was self-indulgent, it was fat, it was rich, it was full of the most
loathsome kinds of open and flagrant moneymaking. All the worst aspects of
the French came out as the franc dropped. And yet that decade in Paris was
perfect. I suppose it was the right period for us. Because of the war, I was a
lot older than I should have been to do what I was doingtrying to learn an
art. But I was trying to do it alone, which is the best way to try to do it, and I
was living in a city where you could be alone without ever being lonely, and I
had Ada with me. SheI dont need to tell youwas a singer. A lovely singer
with a beautiful, clear, high voice, and a superb musician. She was going
great guns singing new songs for Stravinsky and Poulenc and Copland. So we
were right in the middle of the most exciting period in almost a century of
music. Also, the people who drifted alongErnest, Dos, Scott, Gerald Murphy,
above all, the Murphyswere people of extraordinary interest who were also
or became, most of themclose friends. I can see why this still interests
meI love to go back to it in my mindbut why anybody else forty, fifty,
sixty years younger should be interested in it, I just dont understand.
INTERVIEWER
What was the special pull of the Murphys? Why did they give up that mode of
life? Did Gerald Murphys friends try to persuade him to stick to the arts?
MACLEISH
Three questions. The last two are tragically easy to answer. Gerald gave up
painting when his youngest child, Patrick, who had had tuberculosis and, he
thought, recovered, became ill again. Gerald wasnt Irish for nothing. He bore
the stigmataincluding the deep Puritan wound which afflicts Irish
Catholicism and distinguishes the Gaels of Eire from the Gaels of the Scottish
islands in the Hebrides. Gerald took that second (and fatal) illness as a
judgment on himself. He hadnt earned the right to art. When, after the
agony was over, the Murphys settled in New York, Gerald threw everything
out of his room but the bed and a chairwhite plaster walls, a white bed and
chair. Did his friends try to dissuade him? How could they? And yet I
remember an ambiguous scene. A Paris concert hall. An occasion of some
kind: the Murphys are in a box and Ada and I with them. Picasso appears in
front of the box looking at Geraldsmiling at him. Gerald stares over his
head. Picasso turns away. But I am not answering your questions. Why did
they give up that mode of life? It was the other way around. Their older
son, Baoth, who had always been well, happy, a golden child, died suddenly,
brutally, at sixteen. Then Patrickan extraordinary human being, un
monsieur, as Picasso said, qui est par hazard un enfantdied after years
of dying, also at sixteen. Then there were the consequences of all that
doctoring and hospitalizationyears in Montana-Vermala, in the Adirondacks,

Depression income. Their money was all but gone. They had never been
rich by American standards, but they had always spent money as though
they were, having a blithe contempt for money as sucha healthy conviction
that money should be used for the purposes of life, the living of life, the
defeat of illness and death. One has to pay for a faith like that, and Gerald
and Sara paid without a whimper. He went back to Mark Cross, the business
his father had founded. I never heard him complain of anything except the
boredom. But he put up with that, supported his wife and daughter, saved his
sisters holdings, and made Mark Cross, for a few, vivid years, a creative
enterprise . . . not necessarily profitable, but real. Merchant prince he used
to call himself in those days, mocking his life. But when he was dying (of
cancer), Ren dHarnoncourt, then the head of The Museum of Modern Art,
told me I might tell him the museum had accepted his Wasp and Pear for its
permanent collection. I feel sure he died thinking of himself as a painter. He
should have. He was a painter. And a man. A man who loved life and learned
how to live it. And how to diesomething not all men learned, even in that
generation.
That or something like it would be the answer to your first questionthe
special pull, I think you said. No one has even been able quite to define it.
Scott tried in Tender Is the Night. Dos tried in more direct terms. Ernest tried
by not trying. I wrote a Sketch for a Portrait of Mme. GM, a longish
poem. They escaped us all. There was a shine to life wherever they were: not
a decorative added value, but a kind of revelation of inherent loveliness, as
though custom and habit had been wiped away and the thing itself was, for
an instant, seen. Dont ask me how.
INTERVIEWER
Did the Americans in Paris in the twenties know who they were? Was there
any sense among them that what they were doing would have overwhelming
impact before they were through?
MACLEISH
I can only answer for myselfwhat I saw and heard. Everyone was aware, I
think, that work was being produced in Paris which was magnificent by any
standard. This was true of all the artsthe arts generallythe arts as
practiced by artists of many nationalities: French, Spanish, Russian, Irish,
German, Greek, Austrian. We knew we belonged to a great, a greatly creative,
generationthat we lived in a generative time. Everything seemed possible
was possible. To be young in a time like that was incredible luckto be young
and in Paris. That much is certain; the witnesses are innumerable. But when
you narrow the circle to the American the answers are not so easy. American
letters at the turn of the century had reached something which looked to my

generation like rock bottom, and the achievements of Eliot and Pound during
and after the First World War, though they had raised our hearts, had not
wholly persuaded us that we belonged in this great resurgence of all the arts
which was evident in Paristhis world resurgence of great art. So our
excitement, real enough, was a little hesitant, a little tentative. Hemingways
In Our Time was the first solid American proof to appear on the Seineproof
that a master of English prose had established himself and that this master
was indubitably American, American not only by blood but by eye and ear.
But In Our Time was a collection of short stories. Would there be a great
novel? A great American novel? We didnt know in Paris in the twenties. We
only knew anything was possible.
INTERVIEWER
In that twenties community, how much exchange of ideas went on . . .
reading of each others manuscripts, advice sought and given . . . ?
MACLEISH
None. None so far as I was concerned. I met Hemingway a year or so after we
got to Paris and Gerald Murphy about the same time . . . Dos, Estlin
Cummings, Bishop, Scott . . . but there was no community in the sense in
which you, I think, are using the word. No Americans-in-Paris community. That
notion is a myth concocted after the event by critics with fish to fry. There
was the literary-tourist world of the Dme and the Rotonde but no work came
out of that. The real community was, of course, Paristhe Paris of Valry
and Fargue and Larbaudthe world center of art which had drawn Picasso
from abroad, and Juan Gris and Stravinsky and all the rest of that great
international generation including, first and foremost, Joyce. The world center
of poetry which held Alxis St.-Lger down at the Quai dOrsay in his
anonymity as St.-John Perse. That communityreal communitydrew and
sustained the young Americans who lived in Paris in those years, but they
didnt belong to it nor did they communicate with it, except to watch and
wonder like the rest of the world. I knew Fargue and Larbaud, and Jules
Romains through Adrienne Monnier. Alexis Lger became a close friend many
years afterward, when all this was gone and Paris was a Nazi slum. I knew
Joyce and marveled at him. But I was not part of that Paris nor were any
Americans I knew, with the possible exceptions of Tom Eliot and Ezra Pound,
who sometimes appeared. In a touching letter toward the end of his life, Scott
speaks of the last American season in Paris. If there ever was an American
season in Paris in the twenties, Paris was not aware of it. Nor, I think, was
anyone else.
INTERVIEWER
Can I try instant analysis about why were so interested in that time, that

romance? Part of what the period means, part of the reason people come
back to it, is that the glamour is forgivable in a way that glamour isnt
forgivable now. People could live as they lived without the sense that all
around was an active enmity to their values, their standards, their way of
perceiving. In a sense going back to the twentiesyou called it that selfindulgent timeis trying to find a release from the pressure of justifiable
hostility. Possible?
MACLEISH
Im not sure Id use the word glamournot, certainly, of our life, Adas and
mine. But there was a certain relaxation. We were all of us out of that worst
of wars. Ernest had been shot up. Scott had not really been involved in it,
but that was tragedy too. I had had a year of it in France. My brother had
been killed. Almost everybody that we sawcertainly all the French, and all
the English in Paris at that timehad lived through it. So the whole city gave
off a sense that you had something coming to youjust what, you never
asked . . . or learned.
INTERVIEWER
You were talking at lunch about people perceiving themselves as images of
themselves rather than as genuine functions in the world and so on. Do you
think that being a writer now is essentially a different kind of act from what it
once was, a different kind of performance?
MACLEISH
Not essentiallyessentially there is only one life a writer can live. But
differentyes. Because the world is different. The economic reality is
different. The Republic doesnt have the self-generated surge forward that it
seemed to have a generation ago. Weve come in out of the dream, and we
have to think about the world we see around us, do something about it, at
least be sensitive to it. Which means be sensitive to it as poets. And yet all
the time and in spite of the changes in the worldthe rapid and incoherent
changesthe question at the center, the poets question, remains the same:
Who am I? The figures out on the lawn playing croquet have changed. They
are not playing croquet anymore. They arent dressed as they once were, and
theres somebody with a gun back of the bush. But the question remains. So
that the problem is to answer the old question in a new scene, a new setting,
with other angles of light, refractions of sound, shadows movingbut still,
somehow, to answer it.
INTERVIEWER
So writing now is different. But more difficult?

MACLEISH
Well, I have just had the experience, as Ive said, of writing a playScratch
the whole purpose of which was to try to find out what has become of the
Republic in this new world weve been talking about. I found the critic of the
Times, who exercises the power of life and death in the New York theater,
totally impenetrable by this idea, buttoned up, occluded. He was an
Englishman at that periodan Englishman and an authority on the dance
and he simply didnt understand what was being said on the stage twenty
feet in front of him. Which suggests to me that the problem of writing about
the public world may have become more difficult than it was forty years ago.
Or perhaps it is only the problem of getting through that particular infarct to
the live audience behind him.
INTERVIEWER
I remember when you were teaching you were strong for alive and living
as critical terms. What are the referents, anyway? What gives the edge?
MACLEISH
To start negatively, alive is what is not literary. Or, in positive terms, what
has a speakera voice. No writing is alive which is merely written. Donne, for
example. Why is Donne so present? Why is Hopkins so much Hopkins? Or
Cummings? Or Mark Van Doren? Or Agee? Cal Lowell? Wilbur? Not because
they write well but because they speak. Each with his own voice. Theres a
man there, a womanEmily. The lawyers have a useful wordfungible.
Wheat is fungible: substitute one bushel for another. Poets cant be
substituted. Each has his own, lets call it breath, except that it goes on and
on with the wordsdoesnt end with the man. So that the words remain his.
And alive.
INTERVIEWER
Breath?
MACLEISH
Well, the use of the language. The way a man uses it. You dont choose a
word if youre a writer as a golf pro chooses a club with the shot in mind. You
choose it with yourself in mindyour needs, your passions, feelings. It has to
carry the green, yes, but it must also carry you. Not only your meaning, but
you yourself meaning it. Youre quite rightthis does seem to me the
fundamental criterion in the use of language as material for art. You create
your words in choosing them. You make them yoursspoken with your
breath. Youngsters tend to think the trick is to break down the syntaxbe
carelesswrite the way they think they talk. Nothing could be farther from

the truth. To make a word your own is a years labormaybe a lifes.

INTERVIEWER
The MacLeish poems I like best give this sense that metaphors are racing and
expending energy fiercelythe edge of a moment. Cook County, You,
Andrew Marvell, The Genius, for example. Did they come in a rush?
MACLEISH
Those are golden words; I shouldnt let myself think about them. Because
even at my age a man shouldnt let himself believe what he most wants to
believe. You delight me by saying some of my poems sound as though they
had come in a rush, but none of them have with the exception of You,
Andrew Marvell, which was there at the end of a morning and finished by
night. I am sureI mean I am not sure at all but I believethe master poets
must come at their poems as a hawk on a pigeon in one dive. I cant. I chip
away like a stonemason who has got it into his head that there is a pigeon in
that block of marble. But theres a delight in the chipping. At least theres a
delight in it when your hunch that the pigeon in there is stronger than you are
carries you along. There is no straining then nor are you strainedall
assurance and confidence. Oh, you can be fooled, of coursethere may be
nothing there but a stone. But until you are . . .
I said something a minute ago about a long breath that sustains itself. If you
find anything like that in any poem, then the impulse which drove the poem
at the start is still alive in the poem printed on the page. So that the length of
that poem is not the length (endless) of the work but the length of the
impulse: exhaustedand achievedin a breath.
I used to run into students who thought impulse meant idea: You got an idea
and somehow you made a poem of it. A poem made out of an idea could run
on forever. No single breath there. Impulse as one finds it in this artmaybe
in all artis a glimpse. Of a relationship, a possible relationshipBaudelaires
analogie universelle. The impulse, the urge, the emotion, begins in that
cloudy glimpse, and the whole labor of art is to create the form which will
contain the relationshipturn glimpse into image. But in such a way that the
poemif you are lucky, if there is a poem at the endwill carry not only the
image but the impulse which produced it, that single breathits own.
INTERVIEWER
If I understand it, then really its all in the end of Reasons for
Musicmeaning the movement of the sea. Can you say that in any other
way? Can you translate?
MACLEISH

Why do we labor at the poem?

Out of the turbulence of the sea,
Flower by brittle flower, rises
The coral reef that calms the water.

Generations of the dying

Fix the seas dissolving salts
In stone, still trees, their branches immovable,
Meaning,
the movement of the sea.

Translate? Well, I am not one of those who believe that poems cant be
translated; it would be an impoverished world if they couldnt. But not, I
think, out of their images. Suppose you say that poets, like those tiny coral
insectsgenerations of the dyingfix the seas dissolving salts in stone, still
trees, their branches immovable, which meanswhat? The movement of the
sea. What have you gained? Its obvious what you have lost: the rhythms
which suspend the words in a relationship of their own without which the
world of the poemof any poemcollapses. (A fact of art which one of my
admired contemporaries, Bill Williams, tried to forget, misleading a whole
generation of the dying as a result.) But, still, what have you gained? Why do
we labor at the poem? To hold the evanescent still in its evanescence. I think
the poem says it betterbut perhaps I should not attempt to judge.
INTERVIEWER
Theres a struggle going on in the stillness, though. Im thinking about
Captivity of a Fly . . . My heart against the hard-rib bone beat like a fly.
What is the theme exactlya prisoner of the open wall? It comes back in
Job, too, as though it were a personal remark in some way. It had gone
free, my heart, it might have gone free, but the shining world so shone.
MACLEISH
The image, of course, is the commonest of all imagesthe fly against the
windowpane that flings itself in flightless flight. So it loves light. And the
refraction of the image is as obvious. We are all prisoners of the open wall.
What else is the burden of the mystery which so weighed on John Keats?

Easy enough to turn away from the glass and go freebut not if youre a fly.
Easy enough to put off the burden of the mysterybut not if youre human.
You spoke of Job. Of course. Easy enough for Job to get down from his dung
heap and walk offif he could stop being Job, the man with a passion for
justice and therefore the need to confront God. Job is the opposite of the
existentialist as he is the opposite of the good Catholic. His world has to
mean, because God made it. It is because he loves God that he is certain
there are meaningsnot the other way around. What satisfies Sartre wont
satisfy Job. Nor what satisfies Jobs friends. He sees the light and so is
prisoner of the glass.
INTERVIEWER
Are you ever completely satisfied with a finished work?
MACLEISH
Not at first. Not while the thing is still malleable. Its like the homicide experts
in the movies who judge by the stiffening of the corpse: you can tellGod
knows howwhen a poem has settled into itself. After that you touch it at
your peril: The whole thing may disintegrate if you change a word. Its for
that reason I formed the habit long ago of putting new poems into a desk
drawer and letting them lie there to ripen (or the opposite) like apples. I
suppose everyone else does the same thing. I learned early and by sad
experience never to publish a green poem. Who in hell wrote that? Instead, I
pull them out after a few weeks or months and say, Well . . . possibly . . .
and start all over. Or consign the whole thing to the wood fire and hope the
seed, whatever it was, will sow itself again. I doubt if it does. Its sick of me
by that time.
INTERVIEWER
Could we talk for a minute about reputation? Can a good writer make his
way without cultivating his own reputation? Interviews, luncheons,
appearance, backscratching, all that crap. A lot of people still feel there is an
Establishment to be cracked or supplanted before they can start to breathe.
MACLEISH
That word, Establishment, has a lot to answer for. If it is intended to refer to
anything more than the distinction between the old men now established and
the young men who want to beif, that is to say, it is intended to imply a
kind of conspiracy by a few established characters to suppress les autresit
is a fraud, or worse, a kind of escape mechanism . . . an excuse. The real
question is the one you put first: how to arrive in the world (if it is one) of
the arts in our time, a world on which all those monsters you name

television and luncheons and appearances and the restbatten and feed. Do
you have to arrive? Not really, but its convenient if you want to eat
regularly. But suppose you do want to eat regularly, do you have to submit to
all that nonsense? Because most of it, though there are some intelligent
interviewers, is nonsense. I dont think so. The fact is that nothing matters
ultimately in any art but the work of artthe poem, the fiction. That comes
first and it is that which remains at the last. Cal Lowell began with a poem. So
did Dick Wilbur. Frost began with a book of poems. To go at it the other way
around is to invite disaster: straw without bricks. Believe in the work. Believe
in your own work. No poem was ever suppressedif it was a poem. Belayed,
yes. Muffled. Ignored for a generation or a century. But not suppressed.
INTERVIEWER
You wrestled once with the problem of reputation in the artsin Poetical
Remains. You talked about leaving behind an anthological rubble, mind
mingled with mind, odd and even coupled. What is the state of feeling
behind the words?
MACLEISH
I suppose you start out (I can only suppose, because it must be a very private
experience for each man) with that lust for fame to which Keats confessed
and to which, I guess, we should all confessall of us who practice an art,
certainly. That lust for fame is a lust for personal fame. You want to be
distinguished from the others who are rememberedif anybody indeed is
going to be remembered. And then, as time goes by and you begin to get a
little hindsight, you look back. What really does happen to poets? Most of
them leave a few fragments which go into the rubble heap, where the next
generation can feed on them. They dont intend to but they do. Well,
eventually, thinking about all this, you get to the point where you realize that
personal fame is not at all what youre concerned with reallythat old Robert
was right when he said he hoped to leave half a dozen poems that would be
hard to get rid of. Wonderful way of saying it. You begin to see that what is
really going to happen is not that half a dozen but two, three, four poems, or
maybe lines of poems, or fragmentssome things may get shelved, shored
up, or left behind. But left behind not alone but in a conjunction. So that you
begin to think of yourself in terms of the others who were with you in this
placeyour contemporaries. Oh living men, Remember me, Receive me
among you. And you realize thats how you are really going to end up. Youre
going to be part of that, of them. And finally you begin to think, thats the
way it ought to be. You ought to make the world fruitful that way. Rot! Leaving
those fragmentsthose few poems that will be hard to get rid of.
Obviously, these are very subjective emotions. But I think, even so, even if

they are subjective, one can make some generalizations about them. How to
go about it? Let me try this way. I think, as you move along . . . now, this may
simply be a result of the blessed accident that befell me when I found myself,
far too old, teaching at Harvard. I began to understand then, by teaching a
course in which I tried to find out for myself what poetry is, what it really is. I
began to understand that it is a part of a process which extends beyond
poetry but which is most apparent in poetry, of trying to see human
experience, trying to see the world. The world being what a man feels
about the world. Now if you realize thiswhat the purpose of your art isyou
come to see that you are laboring at your art not only to make works of art
but to make sense of your lifethose dark and bewildering moments of
experience. And to make sense of it not only for yourself. In other words,
those poems are not works to be published for the glory of A. MacLeishso
that A. MacLeish may be spoken of. Not at all. They are steps in an attempt to
stop time in terms of time so that it may be seen. To stop time, but to stop it
on its own terms. Let men see it. Make it visible to men. Therefore, whatever
you leave behind you exists in terms of those others who have read it, who
were aware of it, who were moved by it. And the consequence is that you do
have a totally different attitude toward fame. It isnt that you want to be
admired any the less. Of course you want to be admired. Any poet wants to
be admiredto be a great poet. But who is a great poet? Maybe a handful in
the worlds history. So thats irrelevant. Whats really going to come out of
your work is something else. If you have succeeded at all you have become
parthowever small a partof the consciousness of your time. Which is
enough. No?

T. S. Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1

Interviewed by Donald Hall ISSUE 21, SPRING-SUMMER 1959
undefined
SKETCH BY D. CAMMELL, 1959.

The interview took place in New York, at the apartment of Mrs. Louis Henry
Cohn, of House of Books, Ltd., who is a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Eliot. The
bookcases of the attractive living room contain a remarkable collection of
modern authors. On a wall near the entrance hangs a drawing of Mr. Eliot,
done by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Ware Eliot. An inscribed wedding
photograph of the Eliots stands in a silver frame on a table. Mrs. Cohn and
Mrs. Eliot sat on a sofa at one end of the room, while Mr. Eliot and the
interviewer faced each other in the center. The microphone of a tape recorder

lay on the floor between them.

Mr. Eliot looked particularly well. He was visiting the United States briefly on
his way back to London from a holiday in Nassau. He was tanned, and he
seemed to have put on weight in the three years since the interviewer had
seen him. Altogether, he looked younger and seemed jollier. He frequently
glanced at Mrs. Eliot during the interview, as if he were sharing with her an
answer which he was not making.
The interviewer had talked with Mr. Eliot previously in London. The small
office at Faber and Faber, a few flights above Russell Square, displays a
gallery of photographs on its walls: here is a large picture of Virginia Woolf,
with an inset portrait of Pius XII; here are I. A. Richards, Paul Valry, W. B.
Yeats, Goethe, Marianne Moore, Charles Whibley, Djuna Barnes, and others.
Many young poets have stared at the faces there, during a talk with Mr. Eliot.
One of them has told a story which illustrates some of the unsuspected in Mr.
Eliots conversation. After an hour of serious literary discussion, Mr. Eliot
paused to think if he had a final word of advice; the young poet, an American,
was about to go up to Oxford as Mr. Eliot had done forty years before. Then,
as gravely as if he were recommending salvation, Mr. Eliot advised the
purchase of long woolen underwear because of Oxfords damp stone. Mr. Eliot
is able to be avuncular while he is quite aware of comic disproportion
between manner and message.
Similar combinations modified many of the comments which are reported
here, and the ironies of gesture are invisible on the page. At times, actually,
the interview moved from the ironic and the mildly comic to the hilarious. The
tape is punctuated by the head-back Boom Boom of Mr. Eliots laughter,
particularly in response to mention of his early derogation of Ezra Pound, and
to a question about the unpublished, and one gathers improper, King Bolo
poems of his Harvard days.

INTERVIEWER
Perhaps I can begin at the beginning. Do you remember the circumstances
under which you began to write poetry in St. Louis when you were a boy?
T.S. ELIOT
I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the inspiration of Fitzgeralds
Omar Khayyam, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and
despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed
completelyso completely that they dont exist. I never showed them to
anybody. The first poem that shows is one which appeared first in the Smith

Academy Record, and later in The Harvard Advocate, which was written as an
exercise for my English teacher and was an imitation of Ben Jonson. He
thought it very good for a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Then I wrote a few at
Harvard, just enough to qualify for election to an editorship on The Harvard
Advocate, which I enjoyed. Then I had an outburst during my junior and
senior years. I became much more prolific, under the influence first of
Baudelaire and then of Jules Laforgue, whom I discovered I think in my junior
year at Harvard.
INTERVIEWER
Did anyone in particular introduce you to the French poets? Not Irving
Babbitt, I suppose.
ELIOT
No, Babbitt would be the last person! The one poem that Babbitt always held
up for admiration was Grays Elegy. And thats a fine poem but I think this
shows certain limitations on Babbitts part, God bless him. I have advertised
my source, I think; its Arthur Symonss book on French poetry*, which I came
across in the Harvard Union. In those days the Harvard Union was a meeting
place for any undergraduate who chose to belong to it. They had a very nice
little library, like the libraries in many Harvard houses now. I liked his
quotations and I went to a foreign bookshop somewhere in Boston (Ive
forgotten the name and I dont know whether it still exists) which specialized
in French and German and other foreign books and found Laforgue, and other
poets. I cant imagine why that bookshop should have had a few poets like
Laforgue in stock. Goodness knows how long theyd had them or whether
there were any other demands for them.
INTERVIEWER
When you were an undergraduate, were you aware of the dominating
presence of any older poets? Today the poet in his youth is writing in the age
of Eliot and Pound and Stevens. Can you remember your own sense of the
literary times? I wonder if your situation may not have been extremely
different.
ELIOT
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or
America in whom one took any particular interest. I dont know what it would
be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a
lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we werent
bothered by each other.
INTERVIEWER

Were you aware of people like Hardy or Robinson at all?

ELIOT
I was slightly aware of Robinson because I read an article about him in The
Atlantic Monthly which quoted some of his poems, and that wasnt my cup of
tea at all. Hardy was hardly known to be a poet at that time. One read his
novels, but his poetry only really became conspicuous to a later generation.
Then there was Yeats, but it was the early Yeats. It was too much Celtic
twilight for me. There was really nothing except the people of the 90s who
had all died of drink or suicide or one thing or another.
INTERVIEWER
Did you and Conrad Aiken help each other with your poems when you were
coeditors on the Advocate?
ELIOT
We were friends but I dont think we influenced each other at all. When it
came to foreign writers, he was more interested in Italian and Spanish, and I
was all for the French.
INTERVIEWER
Were there any other friends who read your poems and helped you?
ELIOT
Well, yes. There was a man who was a friend of my brothers, a man named
Thomas H. Thomas who lived in Cambridge and who saw some of my poems
in The Harvard Advocate. He wrote me a most enthusiastic letter and cheered
me up. And I wish I had his letters still. I was very grateful to him for giving
me that encouragement.
INTERVIEWER
I understand that it was Conrad Aiken who introduced you and your work to
Pound.
ELIOT
Yes it was. Aiken was a very generous friend. He tried to place some of my
poems in London, one summer when he was over, with Harold Monro and
others. Nobody would think of publishing them. He brought them back to me.
Then in 1914, I think, we were both in London in the summer. He said, You
go to Pound. Show him your poems. He thought Pound might like them.
Aiken liked them, though they were very different from his.

INTERVIEWER
Do you remember the circumstances of your first meeting with Pound?
ELIOT
I think I went to call on him first. I think I made a good impression, in his little
triangular sitting room in Kensington. He said, Send me your poems. And he
wrote back, This is as good as anything Ive seen. Come around and have a
talk about them. Then he pushed them on Harriet Monroe, which took a little
time.
INTERVIEWER
In an article about your Advocate days, for the book in honor of your sixtieth
birthday, Aiken quotes an early letter from England in which you refer to
Pounds verse as touchingly incompetent. I wonder when you changed your
mind.
ELIOT
Hah! That was a bit brash, wasnt it? Pounds verse was first shown me by an
editor of The Harvard Advocate, W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez, who was a crony
of mine and Conrad Aikens and the other Signet* poets of the period. He
showed me those little things of Elkin Mathews, Exultations and Personae.*
He said, This is up your street; you ought to like this. Well, I didnt, really. It
seemed to me rather fancy, old-fashioned, romantic stuff, cloak-and-dagger
kind of stuff. I wasnt very much impressed by it. When I went to see Pound, I
was not particularly an admirer of his work, and though I now regard the work
I saw then as very accomplished, I am certain that in his later work is to be
found the grand stuff.
INTERVIEWER
You have mentioned in print that Pound cut The Waste Land from a much
larger poem into its present form. Were you benefited by his criticism of your
poems in general? Did he cut other poems?
ELIOT
Yes. At that period, yes. He was a marvelous critic because he didnt try to
turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to
do.
INTERVIEWER
Have you helped to rewrite any of your friends poems? Ezra Pounds, for
instance?

ELIOT
I cant think of any instances. Of course I have made innumerable
suggestions on manuscripts of young poets in the last twenty-five years or so.
INTERVIEWER
Does the manuscript of the original, uncut Waste Land exist?
ELIOT
Dont ask me. Thats one of the things I dont know. Its an unsolved mystery.
I sold it to John Quinn. I also gave him a notebook of unpublished poems,
because he had been kind to me in various affairs. Thats the last I heard of
them. Then he died and they didnt turn up at the sale.
INTERVIEWER
What sort of thing did Pound cut from The Waste Land? Did he cut whole
sections?
ELIOT
Whole sections, yes. There was a long section about a shipwreck. I dont
know what that had to do with anything else, but it was rather inspired by the
Ulysses canto in The Inferno, I think. Then there was another section which
was an imitation Rape of the Lock. Pound said, Its no use trying to do
something that somebody else has done as well as it can be done. Do
something different.
INTERVIEWER
Did the excisions change the intellectual structure of the poem?
ELIOT
No. I think it was just as structureless, only in a more futile way, in the longer
version.
INTERVIEWER
I have a question about the poem which is related to its composition. In
Thoughts after Lambeth you denied the allegation of critics who said that you
expressed the disillusionment of a generation in The Waste Land, or you
denied that it was your intention. Now F. R. Leavis, I believe, has said that the
poem exhibits no progression; yet on the other hand, more recent critics,
writing after your later poetry, found The Waste Land Christian. I wonder if
this was part of your intention.

ELIOT
No, it wasnt part of my conscious intention. I think that in Thoughts after
Lambeth, I was speaking of intentions more in a negative than in a positive
sense, to say what was not my intention. I wonder what an intention
means! One wants to get something off ones chest. One doesnt know quite
what it is that one wants to get off the chest until ones got it off. But I
couldnt apply the word intention positively to any of my poems. Or to any
poem.
INTERVIEWER
I have another question about you and Pound and your earlier career. I have
read somewhere that you and Pound decided to write quatrains, in the late
teens, because vers libre had gone far enough.
ELIOT
I think thats something Pound said. And the suggestion of writing quatrains
was his. He put me onto Emaux et Cames.*
INTERVIEWER
I wonder about your ideas about the relation of form to subject. Would you
then have chosen the form before you knew quite what you were going to
write in it?
ELIOT
Yes, in a way. One studied originals. We studied Gautiers poems and then we
thought, Have I anything to say in which this form will be useful? And we
experimented. The form gave the impetus to the content.
INTERVIEWER
Why was vers libre the form you chose to use in your early poems?
ELIOT
My early vers libre, of course, was started under the endeavor to practice the
same form as Laforgue. This meant merely rhyming lines of irregular length,
with the rhymes coming in irregular places. It wasnt quite so libre as much
vers, especially the sort which Ezra called Amygism.* Then, of course, there
were things in the next phase which were freer, like Rhapsody on a Windy
Night. I dont know whether I had any sort of model or practice in mind when
I did that. It just came that way.
INTERVIEWER

Did you feel, possibly, that you were writing against something, more than
from any model? Against the poet laureate perhaps?
ELIOT
No, no, no. I dont think one was constantly trying to reject things, but just
trying to find out what was right for oneself. One really ignored poet laureates
as such, the Robert Bridges. I dont think good poetry can be produced in a
kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just
supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. I cant say it
that way, what way can I find that will do? One didnt really bother about the
existing modes.
INTERVIEWER
I think it was after Prufrock and before Gerontion that you wrote the
poems in French which appear in your Collected Poems. I wonder how you
happened to write them. Have you written any since?
ELIOT
No, and I never shall. That was a very curious thing which I cant altogether
explain. At that period I thought Id dried up completely. I hadnt written
anything for some time and was rather desperate. I started writing a few
things in French and found I could, at that period. I think it was that when I
was writing in French I didnt take the poems so seriously, and that, not
taking them seriously, I wasnt so worried about not being able to write. I did
these things as a sort of tour de force to see what I could do. That went on for
some months. The best of them have been printed. I must say that Ezra
Pound went through them, and Edmond Dulac, a Frenchman we knew in
London, helped with them a bit. We left out some, and I suppose they
disappeared completely. Then I suddenly began writing in English again and
lost all desire to go on with French. I think it was just something that helped
me get started again.
INTERVIEWER
Did you think at all about becoming a French symbolist* poet like the two
Americans of the last century?
ELIOT
Stuart Merrill and Vil-Griffin. I only did that during the romantic year I spent
in Paris after Harvard. I had at that time the idea of giving up English and
trying to settle down and scrape along in Paris and gradually write French.
But it would have been a foolish idea even if Id been much more bilingual
than I ever was, because, for one thing, I dont think that one can be a

bilingual poet. I dont know of any case in which a man wrote great or even
fine poems equally well in two languages. I think one language must be the
one you express yourself in, in poetry, and youve got to give up the other for
that purpose. And I think that the English language really has more resources
in some respects than the French. I think, in other words, Ive probably done
better in English than I ever would have in French even if Id become as
proficient in French as the poets you mentioned.
INTERVIEWER
Can I ask you if you have any plans for poems now?
ELIOT
No, I havent any plans for anything at the moment, except that I think I
would like, having just got rid of The Elder Statesman (I only passed the final
proofs just before we left London), to do a little prose writing of a critical sort.
I never think more than one step ahead. Do I want to do another play or do I
want to do more poems? I dont know until I find I want to do it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any unfinished poems that you look at occasionally?
ELIOT
I havent much in that way, no. As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a
thing that might as well be rubbed out. Its better, if theres something good
in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind
than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing
but if its in the memory it becomes transformed into something else. As I
have said before, Burnt Norton began with bits that had to be cut out of
Murder in the Cathedral. I learned in Murder in the Cathedral that its no use
putting in nice lines that you think are good poetry if they dont get the action
on at all. That was when Martin Browne was useful. He would say, There are
very nice lines here, but theyve nothing to do with whats going on on
stage.
INTERVIEWER
Are any of your minor poems actually sections cut out of longer works? There
are two that sound like The Hollow Men.
ELIOT
Oh, those were the preliminary sketches. Those things were earlier. Others I
published in periodicals but not in my collected poems. You dont want to say
the same thing twice in one book.

INTERVIEWER
You seem often to have written poems in sections. Did they begin as separate
poems? I am thinking of Ash Wednesday, in particular.
ELIOT
Yes, like The Hollow Men, it originated out of separate poems. As I recall,
one or two early drafts of parts of Ash Wednesday appeared in Commerce
and elsewhere. Then gradually I came to see it as a sequence. Thats one way
in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout the years poetically
doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them
together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write anything now in the vein of Old Possums Book of Practical Cats
or King Bolo?
ELIOT
Those things do come from time to time! I keep a few notes of such verse,
and there are one or two incomplete cats that probably will never be written.
Theres one about a glamour cat. It turned out too sad. This would never do. I
cant make my children weep over a cat whos gone wrong. She had a very
questionable career, did this cat. It wouldnt do for the audience of my
previous volume of cats. Ive never done any dogs. Of course dogs dont
seem to lend themselves to verse quite so well, collectively, as cats. I may
eventually do an enlarged edition of my cats. Thats more likely than another
volume. I did add one poem, which was originally done as an advertisement
for Faber and Faber. It seemed to be fairly successful. Oh, yes, one wants to
keep ones hand in, you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous
and proper and improper. One doesnt want to lose ones skill.
INTERVIEWER
Theres a good deal of interest now in the process of writing. I wonder if you
could talk more about your actual habits in writing verse. Ive heard you
composed on the typewriter.
ELIOT
Partly on the typewriter. A great deal of my new play, The Elder Statesman,
was produced in pencil and paper, very roughly. Then I typed it myself first
before my wife got to work on it. In typing myself I make alterations, very
considerable ones. But whether I write or type, composition of any length, a
play for example, means for me regular hours, say ten to one. I found that

three hours a day is about all I can do of actual composing. I could do

polishing perhaps later. I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on
longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what Id done after the
three hours were up was never satisfactory. Its much better to stop and think
about something else quite different.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever write any of your nondramatic poems on schedule? Perhaps the
Four Quartets?
ELIOT
Only occasional verse. The Quartets were not on schedule. Of course the
first one was written in 35, but the three which were written during the war
were more in fits and starts. In 1939 if there hadnt been a war I would
probably have tried to write another play. And I think its a very good thing I
didnt have the opportunity. From my personal point of view, the one good
thing the war did was to prevent me from writing another play too soon. I saw
some of the things that were wrong with Family Reunion, but I think it was
much better that any possible play was blocked for five years or so to get up
a head of steam. The form of the Quartets fitted in very nicely to the
conditions under which I was writing, or could write at all. I could write them
in sections and I didnt have to have quite the same continuity; it didnt
matter if a day or two elapsed when I did not write, as they frequently did,
while I did war jobs.
INTERVIEWER
We have been mentioning your plays without talking about them. In Poetry
and Drama you talked about your first plays. I wonder if you could tell us
something about your intentions in The Elder Statesman.
ELIOT
I said something, I think, in Poetry and Drama about my ideal aims, which I
never expect fully to realize. I started, really, from The Family Reunion,
because Murder in the Cathedral is a period piece and something out of the
ordinary. It is written in rather a special language, as you do when youre
dealing with another period. It didnt solve any of the problems I was
interested in. Later I thought that in The Family Reunion I was giving so much
attention to the versification that I neglected the structure of the play. I think
The Family Reunion is still the best of my plays in the way of poetry, although
its not very well constructed.
In The Cocktail Party and again in The Confidential Clerk, I went further in the
way of structure. The Cocktail Party wasnt altogether satisfactory in that

respect. It sometimes happens, disconcertingly, at any rate with a

practitioner like myself, that it isnt always the things constructed most
according to plan that are the most successful. People criticized the third act
of The Cocktail Party as being rather an epilogue, so in The Confidential Clerk
I wanted things to turn up in the third act which were fresh events. Of course,
The Confidential Clerk was so well constructed in some ways that people
thought it was just meant to be farce.
I wanted to get to learn the technique of the theater so well that I could then
forget about it. I always feel its not wise to violate rules until you know how
to observe them.
I hope that The Elder Statesman goes further in getting more poetry in, at
any rate, than The Confidential Clerk did. I dont feel that Ive got to the point
I aim at and I dont think I ever will, but I would like to feel I was getting a
little nearer to it each time.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a Greek model behind The Elder Statesman?
ELIOT
The play in the background is the Oedipus at Colonus. But I wouldnt like to
refer to my Greek originals as models. I have always regarded them more as
points of departure. That was one of the weaknesses of The Family Reunion; it
was rather too close to the Eumenides. I tried to follow my original too
literally and in that way led to confusion by mixing pre-Christian and postChristian attitudes about matters of conscience and sin and guilt.
So in the subsequent three I have tried to take the Greek myth as a sort of
springboard, you see. After all, what one gets essential and permanent, I
think, in the old plays, is a situation. You can take the situation, rethink it in
modern terms, develop your own characters from it, and let another plot
develop out of that. Actually you get further and further away from the
original. The Cocktail Party had to do with Alcestis simply because the
question arose in my mind, what would the life of Admetus and Alcestis be,
after shed come back from the dead; I mean if thered been a break like that,
it couldnt go on just as before. Those two people were the center of the thing
when I started and the other characters only developed out of it. The
character of Celia, who came to be really the most important character in the
play, was originally an appendage to a domestic situation.
INTERVIEWER
Do you still hold to the theory of levels in poetic drama (plot, character,
diction, rhythm, meaning) which you put forward in 1932?

ELIOT
I am no longer very much interested in my own theories about poetic drama,
especially those put forward before 1934. I have thought less about theories
since I have given more time to writing for the theater.
INTERVIEWER
How does the writing of a play differ from the writing of poems?
ELIOT
I feel that they take quite different approaches. There is all the difference in
the world between writing a play for an audience and writing a poem, in
which youre writing primarily for yourselfalthough obviously you wouldnt
be satisfied if the poem didnt mean something to other people afterward.
With a poem you can say, I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have
the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt. Also in a poem
youre writing for your own voice, which is very important. Youre thinking in
terms of your own voice, whereas in a play from the beginning you have to
realize that youre preparing something which is going into the hands of other
people, unknown at the time youre writing it. Of course I wont say there
arent moments in a play when the two approaches may not converge, when I
think ideally they should. Very often in Shakespeare they do, when he is
writing a poem and thinking in terms of the theater and the actors and the
audience all at once. And the two things are one. Thats wonderful when you
can get that. With me it only happens at odd moments.
INTERVIEWER
Have you tried at all to control the speaking of your verse by the actors? To
make it seem more like verse?
ELIOT
I leave that primarily to the producer. The important thing is to have a
producer who has the feeling of verse and who can guide them in just how
emphatic to make the verse, just how far to depart from prose or how far to
approach it. I only guide the actors if they ask me questions directly.
Otherwise I think that they should get their advice through the producer. The
important thing is to arrive at an agreement with him first, and then leave it
to him.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that theres been a general tendency in your work, even in your
poems, to move from a narrower to a larger audience?

ELIOT
I think that there are two elements in this. One is that I think that writing
playsthat is, Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunionmade a
difference to the writing of the Four Quartets. I think that it led to a greater
simplification of language and to speaking in a way which is more like
conversing with your reader. I see the later Quartets as being much simpler
and easier to understand than The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday.
Sometimes the thing Im trying to say, the subject matter, may be difficult,
but it seems to me that Im saying it in a simpler way.
The other element that enters into it, I think, is just experience and maturity. I
think that in the early poems it was a question of not being able toof having
more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one wanted to
put into words and rhythm which one didnt have the command of words and
rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible.
That type of obscurity comes when the poet is still at the stage of learning
how to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way. The only
alternative is not saying it at all, at that stage. By the time of the Four
Quartets, I couldnt have written in the style of The Waste Land. In The Waste
Land, I wasnt even bothering whether I understood what I was saying. These
things, however, become easier to people with time. You get used to having
The Waste Land, or Ulysses, about.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that the Four Quartets are your best work?
ELIOT
Yes, and Id like to feel that they get better as they go on. The second is
better than the first, the third is better than the second, and the fourth is the
best of all. At any rate, thats the way I flatter myself.
INTERVIEWER
This is a very general question, but I wonder if you could give advice to a
young poet about what disciplines or attitudes he might cultivate to improve
his art.
ELIOT
I think its awfully dangerous to give general advice. I think the best one can
do for a young poet is to criticize in detail a particular poem of his. Argue it
with him if necessary; give him your opinion, and if there are any
generalizations to be made, let him do them himself. Ive found that different

people have different ways of working and things come to them in different
ways. Youre never sure when youre uttering a statement thats generally
valid for all poets or when its something that only applies to yourself. I think
nothing is worse than to try to form people in your own image.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think theres any possible generalization to be made about the fact
that all the better poets now, younger than you, seem to be teachers?
ELIOT
I dont know. I think the only generalization that can be made of any value
will be one which will be made a generation later. All you can say at this point
is that at different times there are different possibilities of making a living, or
different limitations on making a living. Obviously a poet has got to find a
way of making a living apart from his poetry. After all, artists do a great deal
of teaching, and musicians too.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that the optimal career for a poet would involve no work at all
but writing and reading?
ELIOT
No, I think that would be ... but there again one can only talk about oneself.
It is very dangerous to give an optimal career for everybody, but I feel quite
sure that if Id started by having independent means, if I hadnt had to bother
about earning a living and could have given all my time to poetry, it would
have had a deadening influence on me.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
ELIOT
I think that for me its been very useful to exercise other activities, such as
working in a bank, or publishing even. And I think also that the difficulty of
not having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of
concentration. I mean it has prevented me from writing too much. The
danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too
much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts. That would
be my danger.
INTERVIEWER

Do you consciously attempt, now, to keep up with the poetry that is being
written by young men in England and America?
ELIOT
I dont now, not with any conscientiousness. I did at one time when I was
reading little reviews and looking out for new talent as a publisher. But as one
gets older, one is not quite confident in ones own ability to distinguish new
genius among younger men. Youre always afraid that you are going as you
have seen your elders go. At Faber and Faber now I have a younger colleague
who reads poetry manuscripts. But even before that, when I came across new
stuff that I thought had real merit, I would show it to younger friends whose
critical judgment I trusted and get their opinion. But of course there is always
the danger that there is merit where you dont see it. So Id rather have
younger people to look at things first. If they like it, they will show it to me,
and see whether I like it too. When you get something that knocks over
younger people of taste and judgment and older people as well, then thats
likely to be something important. Sometimes theres a lot of resistance. I
shouldnt like to feel that I was resisting, as my work was resisted when it was
new, by people who thought that it was imposture of some kind or other.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that younger poets in general have repudiated the
experimentalism of the early poetry of this century? Few poets now seem to
be resisted the way you were resisted, but some older critics like Herbert
Read believe that poetry after you has been a regression to outdated modes.
When you talked about Milton the second time, you spoke of the function of
poetry as a retarder of change, as well as a maker of change, in language.
ELIOT
Yes, I dont think you want a revolution every ten years.
INTERVIEWER
But is it possible to think that there has been a counterrevolution rather than
an exploration of new possibilities?
ELIOT
No, I dont see anything that looks to me like a counterrevolution. After a
period of getting away from the traditional forms, comes a period of curiosity
in making new experiments with traditional forms. This can produce very
good work if what has happened in between has made a difference: when its
not merely going back, but taking up an old form, which has been out of use
for a time, and making something new with it. That is not counterrevolution.

Nor does mere regression deserve the name. There is a tendency in some
quarters to revert to Georgian scenery and sentiments; and among the public
there are always people who prefer mediocrity, and when they get it, say,
What a relief! Heres some real poetry again. And there are also people who
like poetry to be modern but for whom the really creative stuff is too strong
they need something diluted.
What seems to me the best of what Ive seen in young poets is not reaction
at all. Im not going to mention any names, for I dont like to make public
judgments about younger poets. The best stuff is a further development of a
less revolutionary character than what appeared in earlier years of the
century.
INTERVIEWER
I have some unrelated questions that Id like to end with. In 1945 you wrote,
A poet must take as his material his own language as it is actually spoken
around him. And later you wrote, The music of poetry, then, will be a music
latent in the common speech of his time. After the second remark, you
disparaged standardized BBC English. Now isnt one of the changes of the
last fifty years, and perhaps even more of the last five years, the growing
dominance of commercial speech through the means of communication?
What you referred to as BBC English has become immensely more powerful
through the ITA and BBC television, not to speak of CBS, NBC, and ABC. Does
this development make the problem of the poet and his relationship to
common speech more difficult?
ELIOT
Youve raised a very good point there. I think youre right, it does make it
more difficult.
INTERVIEWER
I wanted you to make the point.
ELIOT
Yes, but you wanted the point to be made. So Ill take the responsibility of
making it: I do think that where you have these modern means of
communication and means of imposing the speech and idioms of a small
number on the mass of people at large, it does complicate the problem very
much. I dont know to what extent that goes for film speech, but obviously
radio speech has done much more.
INTERVIEWER

I wonder if theres a possibility that what you mean by common speech will
disappear.
ELIOT
That is a very gloomy prospect. But very likely indeed.
INTERVIEWER
Are there other problems for a writer in our time which are unique? Does the
prospect of human annihilation have any particular effect on the poet?
ELIOT
I dont see why the prospect of human annihilation should affect the poet
differently from men of other vocations. It will affect him as a human being,
no doubt in proportion to his sensitiveness.
INTERVIEWER
Another unrelated question: I can see why a mans criticism is better for his
being a practicing poet, better, although subject to his own prejudices. But do
you feel that writing criticism has helped you as a poet?
ELIOT
In an indirect way it has helped me somehow as a poetto put down in
writing my critical valuation of the poets who have influenced me and whom I
admire. It is merely making an influence more conscious and more articulate.
Its been a rather natural impulse. I think probably my best critical essays are
essays on the poets who had influenced me, so to speak, long before I
thought of writing essays about them. Theyre of more value, probably, than
any of my more generalized remarks.
INTERVIEWER
G. S. Fraser wonders, in an essay about the two of you, whether you ever met
Yeats. From remarks in your talk about him, it would seem that you did. Could
you tell us the circumstances?
ELIOT
Of course I had met Yeats many times. Yeats was always very gracious when
one met him and had the art of treating younger writers as if they were his
equals and contemporaries. I cant remember any one particular occasion.
INTERVIEWER
I have heard that you consider that your poetry belongs in the tradition of

American literature. Could you tell us why?

ELIOT
Id say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished
contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in
England. That Im sure of.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think theres a connection with the American past?
ELIOT
Yes, but I couldnt put it any more definitely than that, you see. It wouldnt be
what it is, and I imagine it wouldnt be so good; putting it as modestly as I
can, it wouldnt be what it is if Id been born in England, and it wouldnt be
what it is if Id stayed in America. Its a combination of things. But in its
sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.
INTERVIEWER
One last thing. Seventeen years ago you said, No honest poet can ever feel
quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written. He may have
wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. Do you feel the same
now, at seventy?
ELIOT
There may be honest poets who do feel sure. I dont.

* The Symbolist Movement in Literature.

* Harvards literary club.
* Early books of Pound, published by Elkin Mathews in 1909.
* Poems by Thophile Gautier.
* A reference to Amy Lowell, who captured and transformed imagism.