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(This interview with Christopher Isherwood was recorded by Stanley Poss at Mr Isherwood’s home in Santa Monica, California, in the summer of 1960.)

I thought we might begin with the routine questions: work habits, that sort of thing. Do you write every day?

     I try to, yes. I work in the morning rather than any other time. And I try every day simply to make the effort of writing.

     Whether it’s fiction or whatever?

     To write something, yes, to keep the hand flexible, as it were.

     How much do you get done in a day, normally?

     Well, that varies enormously, but it would be a very, very good day if I could write 3,000 words.

     Revise a lot?

     Yes.

     On that day?

     No, I used to, but now my view is that one should write whole drafts, several whole drafts, each time going right through the whole thing. I used to revise with a feeling that if I didn’t secure my rear I couldn’t advance. I felt that I had to have chapter one absolutely perfect; but then I realized how silly that is, because you can only revise chapter one in the light of chapter thirty, or whatever it is.

     Do you find it easier to write dialogue than straight narrative?

     Oh, that’s a hard question. I don’t feel very much difference . . .

     I think critics maybe would have expected you to answer yes on that. They speak of the general sense of ease in all of your dialogue.

     Well, like thousands of other writers, I find that the great thing with dialogue is to have, well, as a musician would say, ‘Give me a chord’: You know, if I can once hear the kind of noise this character makes, then I can go on writing the dialogue. If I have, as it were, three or four specimen sentences that he would say and I have the sound of his or her voice in my ear, then I find it very easy.

     Do you write from notes? Letters? Diaries?

     Diaries, yes. I’ve always kept diaries extensively, and they give me a great sense of security because I feel at least this part is factual. Having, however, built on these little islands of fact, I think one goes back and reconstructs everything and changes everything and interferes with everything. But I do find it a great reassurance — the only kind of reassurance one can have — to have had some notes of an actual experience or an actual scene or people or whatever.

     I wonder if you have a potential reader in mind when you’re writing fiction?

     No, I don’t think so. One’s friends, of course, to some extent. Yet more and more I write for myself, I think. More and more, writing is appearing to me as a kind of self-analysis, a finding-out something about myself and about the past, and about what life is like, as far as I’m concerned; who I am; who these people are; what it’s all about. And this comes from a subconscious level to some extent, so that I really don’t know what may spring out of the typewriter.

     Hemingway answered the question ‘How do you name your characters?’ by saying ‘The best I can.’ How would you answer it?

     Oh, well, I think a good deal about that, and I always feel that there are ideal names for them. Of course, where there’s some kind of living model, then the person’s actual name is taken into consideration; and names, don’t you think, go in groups — and so one chooses another name out of the same group.

     How about someone like Mary Scriven, for example?

     You mean, why was she named Scriven?

     Yes.

     Simply because it is a fairly unusual Irish name, and I happened to know a boy at school with the name Scriven, and I liked the name, rather.

     Let me fire a lot of questions at you all at once. I think the answers will probably form kind of a unit. How much do you admit to modelling your characters from real people? Do all your characters have real life models? Can you say anything about the process of turning a real person into a fictional one?

     Well, yes, I’d say that the great majority of them have real life models; I don’t feel at all secure when I’m not writing out of my personal experience.

     Back to the diaries — Yes. As for turning them into fiction, well that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The demands of the form gradually make themselves felt and you modify, simplify, exaggerate, heighten, lower various characteristics for persons.

     Can we talk about form? You’ve been praised for your handling of structural problems. Is there any general statement you could make about the organization of a novel, or take a particular novel which had, say, an organizational problem or problem of technique that gave you trouble? Could you enlarge upon meeting that problem and handling it?

     Well, my whole life as a writer has really been teetering between trying to do two different things. One is a real constructed novel, very much with E. M. Forster as my master, or in a funny way, Ibsen. Yes, Ibsen, undoubtedly — all the excitement and fun of the awful thing that happened twenty years ago and which gradually rears its head — that fascinates me. So I’m tremendously interested in form and construction. On the other hand, in some of my books I’ve turned away from it. For example, in Prater Violet, in Goodbye to Berlin. In fact you might say All the Conspirators, The Memorial, I suppose Mr Norris and The World in the Evening are constructed novels; and that Goodbye to Berlin and Prater Violet and the novel I’m writing now are something else again altogether; they are, as it were, portraits. I’ve constantly used a rather stupid and pretentious sounding phrase, ‘dynamic portraits’, but what I mean is a portrait that grows, a little bit like the portrait of Dorian Gray grew or changed. Rather the idea, if you can imagine, of uncovering a picture, a painting of somebody and everybody looks at it and says ‘Yes, yes’; and then you say, No, wait a minute, you think you’ve looked at this picture, but you haven’t. Allow me to point out certain things about it,’ And by successive stages, the viewer is encouraged to look deeper and deeper into the picture, until finally it looks completely different to him.

     Wasn’t that the intent of the shuffling of the time sequence in The Memorial?

     Yes, it was. I think I discuss that in Lions and Shadows, don’t I?

     I thought I found a kind of contrapuntal organization (if you’ll forgive such a pretentious term) in Goodbye to Berlin. For example, the six parts seem to me to be played off against one another. The first diary section, ‘Autumn 1930’, could be juxtaposed, let’s say, deliberately, with the last diary section ‘32-’33. And then, ‘Sally Bowles’ and ‘On Ruegen Island’ seem to me to be in a way halves, that is, kind of polarities of one another; and ‘The Nowaks’ and ‘The Landauers’ certainly seem to be related.

     Well, obviously, I tried to organize these portraits. I arrange them, I relate them to each other. In the book I’m writing now the portraits are as much related to each other as I can manage. But that’s only a secondary consideration, whereas in writing one of these constructed novels the structure is enormously important, as I at present feel, too important. I think it’s rather strangling.

     I take it you would admit to the influence of the movies generally upon your work?

     Oh certainly. You see I had my first training in writing movies before I even wrote The Last of Mr Norris. (1)

     What movies were those?

     Well, it was the movie that is described in Prater Violet, except that it’s quite a different movie. It was a movie based on an Austrian novel called Kleine Freundin, Little Friend, it sounds dreadful in English, certainly. It was one of these fundamentally very saccharine stories about a little girl who brings her divided parents together again. But it was all dressed up in psychoanalysis, which was a relatively new thing at that time, so it was quite an amusing picture; and the man who directed it, Berthold Viertel, is, of course, described in Prater Violet.

     He’s of course written about it in, I think, The Saturday Review. Have you read that piece?

     I probably did, yes — he’s dead now, you know. He was a great, great friend of mine and a great instructor in many things.

     He worked with Brecht too, didn’t he?

     Yes. He knew Brecht quite well when Brecht lived here during the war, and in many ways the fact that I’m sitting in this room is due to the Viertels. They used to live in a house just down here at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon, and when I came to America one of my objectives was to meet his wife, Mrs Salka Viertel, which I then did, and we became great friends. So I settled in the Canyon here, and on and off, with interruptions, for the last twenty years I’ve lived in different houses in this area, most of them visible from this window.

     Is this the slide area?

     Well, strictly speaking, the slide area is around the corner there—that’s where the cliff comes down.

     Is that where Gavin Lambert lives?

     Oh no, you can throw a stone on Gavin’s roof; he’s just down there on the road below us.

     I understand you admired his novel [The Slide Area]?

     Very much so. I thought it was marvellous.

     Did you know Brecht when he lived here?

     Yes, indeed.

     I have been reading a new book on him by Esslin.

     Yes, I knew there was a new book. Salka Viertel had a tremendous salon, all kinds of people came to the house. Thomas Mann came constantly; he lived just across on the other side of the hill, and, of course, Chaplin was there a great deal and Heinrich Mann and Schönberg and all sorts of people who were around in this area.

     When I asked you about the movies I was thinking of their connections with fictional structures specifically. For example, were you ever struck by the film device called montage as a fruitful thing to use in fiction: rapid juxtaposition of scenes, that sort of thing?

     Yes, to some extent, but, more importantly, I think what the movies taught me was visualization. Of course, the art of the movie is fundamentally opposed to that of literature, because the fewer words you have in a movie, the better — let’s not kid ourselves. One is always trying to tell the thing in visual terms and not yak. But you do learn a great deal, at least I did, from just seeing the people in a room and seeing them in relative positions in a room and all this kind of thing, which purely non-dramatic writers simply don’t think about. They don’t think in those terms.

     Would you agree that Dickens is one of the finest scenario writers the movies have ever had?

     Oh well, yes, and of course he was an actor of considerable talent and obviously, in a way, a dramatist. Whether he would have liked to have written real plays or not, I don’t know. But he certainly did write them, in his way.

     On a completely different tack, the autobiographical element and so on, would Stephen Spender be the model for Peter Wilkinson in ‘On Ruegen Island’?

     No, the only description of Stephen is in Lions and Shadows, where he’s called ‘Stephen Savage’.

     I don’t know who ‘Allen Chalmers’ is. Can one know who he is?

     Oh yes. ‘Allen Chalmers’ is a very gifted and interesting writer who’s unfortunately done very little, but I’m sure he will be heard of in a very big way soon. His name is Edward Upward. He wrote one novel years ago, called Journey to the Border; did you ever read that one?

     No, I haven’t. I’ve only seen his name.

     Well, it’s a slightly Kafkaesque kind of novel — quite a masterpiece, both structurally and in the writing. He also wrote a couple of pieces which appeared in John Lehmann’s New Writing. He’s now working on a very ambitious novel. (2) All these years he’s been a schoolmaster in London. He’s still the final judge, as far as I’m concerned, of my work; I always send everything to him.

     Whatever happened to the Rats Hostel-Mortmere manuscripts?

     I think he has them. Really, the only Rats Hostel thing of any interest was the thing that he wrote called ‘The Railway Accident’, which came out in New Directions, number eleven, was it?

     I was struck by many characters carrying over from one of your novels to the next, and that made me wonder to what degree is each novel an entirely new experiment. Does it help take the shock off the plunge into a new work to have characters — Mary Scriven, for example — carry over from one novel to the next?

     Well, no, I don’t feel that it really helps very much. But you know, if you’re producing a play, let’s say, and you can have one of the actors or actresses from an earlier production, then there’s a nice kind of family feeling, a ‘How nice to be working with you again’ kind of feeling.

     On the part of the reader, you mean, or on the part of the writer?

     On the part of the writer.

     But it does give the reader that sense too; he feels he’s among friends when he meets characters he’s met before.

     As a matter of fact, of course, my work is all part of an autobiography, and in every case there’s a slight advance in time; the end of the work takes place a little later each time. The novel that I just finished the rough draft of ends in the early fifties.

     Has it a title?

     Down There on a Visit, which is a reference to Huysman’s La Bas, because it is partly a novel about hell.

     Does it have an American setting?

     Yes. But a lot of it is set in Germany (not Berlin), Greece and London. You see this novel has arisen out of another novel which I wrote just before this and which was also called Down There on a Visit, but which somehow didn’t jell. I wrote the entire novel and then realized it wouldn’t work the way it was.

     Had you read The Sound and the Fury when you wrote The Memorial?

     No, to be quite frank with you I never have gotten through The Sound and the Fury.

     It’s organized almost identically with your novel.

     Oh, really; well, it’s quite accidental.

     Cyril Connolly devoted several pages to you in Enemies of Promise, particularly on style and construction. He thought The Memorial was very well constructed but he wondered pessimistically whether even faultless construction would be enough to offset the limitations of the ‘impoverished realist vocabulary’ that you seemed headed for at that time.

     Well . . .

     How about the later works in this connection?

     I wouldn’t say my vocabulary is so impoverished, would you? On the contrary, I’ve since then been accused of writing purple passages.

     He was concerned with your ‘fatal’ readability, at that time.

     I don’t think one should ever apologize for readability, I must say.

     In your introduction to the New Directions edition of All the Conspirators, you spoke of your attempts at imitating the techniques of Joyce, Virginia Woolf, F. M. Forster: streams of consciousness, management of time, flashbacks, etc. But really you didn’t wholly abandon such techniques when you came to write the novels that we now think of as distinctly your own, did you? You seem to find particularly congenial the flashback technique that Forster has used so effectively.

     Oh yes, that’s quite true.

     Would you say that problems of ego and the abandonment of self are the core of your work? Were you thinking along such lines before your interest in Vedanta?

     I think I must have been to some extent because, since philosophies are made for man and not vice versa, I obviously became interested in Vedanta because it suited me, it spoke to my condition, and therefore, I suppose, I was thinking of it. But not consciously.

     The end of Prater Violet does seem to suggest the necessity of the loss of the ego, doesn’t it?

     Yes, however, it’s very important for me to stress that — I have to say this very often to people — I was trying to give a picture of myself at a special moment in my life. Therefore I stressed an acute sense of despair.

     Walking the streets at 3 a.m . . .

     Yes, after the book came out quite a lot of people said, well, this is all that his philosophy has brought him to. That is, completely schizoid, tortured by both worlds, which I don’t think is true at all. But looking back on this period, I was trying to convey a sense of acute malaise, which was my condition at the time.

     Can you briefly distinguish for me between Vedanta and Hinduism proper?

     Of course, Vedanta is Hindu philosophy. There are many schools of Hindu philosophy but this is the basic teaching. It’s called ‘Vedanta’ simply because it’s based on the teachings of the Vedas, which are the most ancient sacred books of the Hindus. And it’s a non-dualistic philosophy, that is to say it says that that which is outside is also inside.

     Yes, as you explained in your little booklet ‘What Vedanta Means to Me’.

     Yes, that’s right.

     You spoke of your hostility to the dualism of Christianity.

     Yes, an enormous amount of the attacks on religion are based on the assumption that religion is necessarily dualistic. And not only necessarily dualistic but unchangeably, and irrevocably, and sternly dualistic. They say, ‘Look: up there is the boss, the landowner, the oppressor (or whatever word they use from their own province), and we’re down here. Of course we’re opposed to him, of course we hate his heaven and love his hell. Who wouldn’t revolt?’ Now this is a completely wrong formulation, whether you’re dealing with Christianity or any other religion, because the dualism always, to some extent, arises out of non-dualism. I mean it’s all very nice for me to say that God is inside me, but I can’t feel it. So what can I do? I look around for somebody else who seems to be more God-like than I and establish a cult of him or her; but you see this is dualism based on a fundamental non-dualism. Well, there’s a lot of difference psychologically there.

Stephen Monk’s coming to consciousness is, if not a reflection of your preoccupation with Vedanta ideas, certainly at any rate not uncongenial to them, not hostile to them. Did you intend anything specifically religious in his progress, in his journey through the book?

     Well, perhaps that’s the whole trouble. Maybe it should have been much more or much less than it was, you know. There’s something there which is, to my mind, fundamentally wrong. I don’t like the character. I think that whole part should be taken out and put together again differently. But what I was trying to show, of course, was the revolt of a birthright Quaker away from that and then finally to some extent coming around to feeling that after all the Quakers have got something.

     Can I talk about the Vedanta and the test that you spoke of in Lions and Shadows? Passing the test was a crucial issue. Has Vedanta obviated passing the test, or is it a much more demanding test than riding the AJS motorcycle flat out while you counted to one hundred?

     Well, whatever it’s done for me personally (which is, of course, always a question the individual can’t answer), obviously it obviates or does away with the necessity of a test, because a test has something to do with the ego, doesn’t it? It has to do with establishing the importance of one’s ego. And it has to do with will and aggression and so forth. Vedanta, or indeed, I would think, any other religious faith, has to do with quite the opposite, with the concept of mercy, with the concept of acceptance, with the concept of love rather than . . .

     Competition?

     Yes, rather than competition.

     A switch again. You wrote in your foreword to Gerald Hamilton’s Mr Norris and I, that on looking back to The Last of Mr Norris, you were repelled by the heartlessness of the book, that it was a heartless fairy story about real people with acute miseries, suffering starvation, that the real monster of the book was the young narrator who passed so gaily through it, constructing his own private fantasies. Is that still your view of The Last of Mr Norris, though not Goodbye to Berlin?

     Yes, it doesn’t bother me terribly, but I think it is true. Perhaps, if one could rewrite things, perhaps one should heighten this a little and project it rather more, and then it would be rather charming. I mean it’s just a matter of how you present it. Cyril Connolly once said to me that he did feel that a change took place in the character and that the character got slightly more mature toward the end of the book. Be that as it may, I would like to point that out. In fact in the book I’m writing now, which covers a rather large area of my life, I think perhaps this point is brought out a bit more.

     You thought yourself that the narrator in Goodbye to Berlin was an advance over the narrator in Mr Norris?

     Yes.

You thought he was a little less the anonymous, blandly accepting camera-eye character?

     You see, it’s a terribly difficult problem. The world, with all its woes and sufferings, makes us feel that we should behave decently, as though we were in church, you know, and be sad with the sad and so forth. On the other hand, the heartless delight of the artist in any kind of experience goes contrary to that, and there we have a situation. I wouldn’t mind how heartless Chris was if this were projected a little more. I mean, why shouldn’t he have a ball watching the goings-on in Germany. You know the way the young are. It’s fascinating — it’s a tremendous drama, and if he didn’t see the excitement of it he wouldn’t have written it down; and in so far as the creation of art works is desirable, it’s presumably preferable that he should have written it down. So if he’d sat down mourning and weeping over the whole thing and being just too depressed for words, he would probably have left in a week and that would have been the end of it.

     John Wain was very impressed by Elizabeth Rydal [of The World in the Evening].

     Oh, really?

     Yes, have you read his review? Do you read critics of your work?

Well, I do, but I’ve never read that, no.

     Well, it’s a strange review because it starts out very snidely; he quotes Bergman in Prater Violet on ‘The English tragedy’, which is, as he tells Chris, that the Englishman always marries his mother, a subject that Bergman intends to write a novel about, to be called ‘The Diary of an Etonian Oedipus’. Wain rather maliciously quotes that passage and says, we now have, in this novel, ‘The Diary of an Etonian Oedipus’, and he sounds rather snide about it. Then he goes on in his review to make it quite clear that he’s very impressed by the novel and that he’s especially impressed by Elizabeth Rydal. I wonder if you could enlarge upon the creation of her character? That is, was there anything, let’s say, of Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf in your mind?

     Yes, there undoubtedly was. That’s another thing which I think is wrong with that book. She somehow or another doesn’t have any real roots for me in life. That is, she seems to me a sort of literary character, and I wish I had de-sanctified her more. The funny thing was that everybody said it must have been very difficult to write her letters. But actually those letters were much the easiest part of the book to write. And perhaps that shows something suspicious. They just flew off the pen. I could write you a whole volume of the letters of Elizabeth Rydal.

     I never understood the title of All the Conspirators.

     Neither has anybody else. I just thought it was a beautiful Shakespearian phrase.

     Does Stephen Monk derive from Christopher Garland, whom you described in Lions and Shadows as a ‘pseudo-monk’, a ‘life-snob’?

     Yes, I suppose he does. There’s something bad, bad there, there’s a bad smell that comes off him.

     Monk or Garland or both?

     Both. No, the parts of that book I like are, well, the part about the Quakers, I think is good. And in fact I think maybe the description of the meeting and one or two other things are really quite good. And, of course, all that is soundly rooted in my own experience, too. I spent quite a long time with the Quakers.

     Was Stephen’s crucial and self-precipitated accident in The World in the Evening a memory of the motorcycle spill you described in Lions and Shadows when you were lying there and looking at the truck?

     I really don’t know; I expect so, yes, it seemed right somehow.

     Was Stephen and Michael Drummond’s climbing of that hazardous outcrop in the novel a memory of The Ascent of F6?

     Oh no, no, I’ve been to the rock I describe and been thoroughly scared by it myself. I suffer acutely from vertigo and it really was a drastic place; not that we attempted to climb it, but we climbed around it. And it’s perfectly true about the Nazi climbing it and putting up the flag; that incident was true. All that scenery is taken from places I’ve been to.

     Do you think you’ll ever write another play with Auden?

     I wish we could, but you know we always seem to be so occupied with our own things. There was a period, I still don’t know whether it may not come to pass, when we thought we were going to do a musical together based on Goodbye to Berlin. And he was interested with Chester Kallman in doing the lyrics. I’m sorry that hasn’t come off, but perhaps it will.

     In your collaboration with him, did it generally work out that you handled the dialogue, the prose sections, while he of course wrote the lyrics? Could you say anything about your collaboration with him on any one of the plays — F6, or The Dog Beneath the Skin?

     Well, they all varied. In the case of The Dog Beneath the Skin, Auden had written a complete play which was called The Search. We then got into correspondence about it and I made suggestions and he made suggestions. I suggested several entire scenes which weren’t in the other version, but then again he made counter-suggestions. We did a great deal of it by correspondence. And then finally, I was living in Copenhagen at the time, he came over and we spent a short time together and got it all done. I always thought of myself as a librettist to some extent with a composer, his verse being the music; and I would say ‘Now we have to have a big speech here,’ you know, and he would write it.

     It must have been a lot of fun.

     Oh, yes, we had a wonderful time together and worked very quickly and easily and at enormous speed. F6 especially was written very fast. By the time we got to On the Frontier, Auden was also more experienced at play writing. Originally, I was the expert in charge of construction; because of my connection with the movies I was supposed to know all about dramatic writing. But by this time we both, you know, just shared the whole job more or less. I think there’s more of Auden’s work in On the Frontier than any of the plays, because he not only wrote all the poetry but also a big share of the prose.

     Back to this idea of to what extent is the new novel an entirely new thing. Wain said in this review that I mentioned before of The World in the Evening that you had been marking time for fifteen years since Prater Violet because you didn’t want to do again what you had done. Was that an accurate guess?

     Well, that’s a kind of statement that you can never make about yourself. I mean that it’s not the way a writer’s mind works at all. It might be perfectly true, but I rather doubt it. You see people get a wonderful view of my lack of production by blissfully ignoring two-thirds of my work. I only produced, I don’t know, what was it — three, four books related to Vedanta in one way or another. And then, of course, there was this travel book, The Condor and the Cows, which I now see is one of my best books.

     I’d better read that one.

     I managed to put an enormous amount of things into it that I wanted to say. But who’s going to read a book about South America? It did very well in England, but . . .

     We’re too close to the border, maybe.

     Yes, nobody here reads about it. But I have a tremendously romantic thing about Quito. I always longed to go to Ecuador. And this is one of the great places I’ve wanted to see in the world. I’ve seen all of them now except Papeete and Lhasa, which I’ll never get to go to, I guess. Papeete, of course, is almost too easy. I think a travel book is a marvellous medium for political and philosophical remarks.

     Which of your books satisfies you the most?

     Prater Violet and the one I’m doing now. I think this new one’s much better than anything else.

     What length is the novel you’re doing now?

     Very long. It’s made up of four episodes, and they vary rather drastically in length. One of them is much longer than the others. A novelette in itself.

     Pritchett thought that your career represents the interaction of the reporter and the artist at its most delicate balance. Does that seem to you a fair generalization?

     Yes, I see what he means.

     He spoke of the distance between the narrator and the rest of the characters. He says the characters are tragic, squalid, comical because the narrator was cut off from them, fundamentally indifferent. Is that more true for, let’s say, the Chris of Mr Norris than for the Chris of Goodbye to Berlin? Is the Chris of Goodbye to Berlin more able to share the life of Otto Nowak than the Chris of Mr Norris able to share the life of Arthur Norris?

     Yes, I would suppose so, yes.

     Gerda criticizes Elizabeth Rydal’s book for its a-political nature. It was published in 1934, that is, her novel was. One wonders in reading Stephen’s defence of Elizabeth’s book whether this is in a way your own statement for those who criticized your work as a-political.

     No, I don’t think so. I simply thought that it was a facet of Gerda’s character that she wouldn’t approve of this kind of book and so naturally, since Stephen was Elizabeth’s husband, he has to defend it. But at the end, you know, he and Charles Kennedy admit that it wasn’t really very good at all.

Who interests you among the younger American writers?

     I quite liked The Subterraneans, and I do plan to read more Kerouac. If you call him younger, I think Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy ever written in the English language. I very much like a couple of books by Calder Willingham, particularly one — Geraldine Bradshaw. I cried laughing all the way through that. I thought it was the most marvellous comic masterpiece. I hope one day that it will be famous.

     Have you read Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

     Yes. I think that Truman Capote, whom I know very well, has an enormous talent. Somehow or other (and I’ve said this to him constantly) I feel that he hasn’t yet quite written about the things that he’d be best at writing about. I always say to him, ‘Why don’t you be our New York Proust? Why don’t you write about feuds and social goings-on in Manhattan?’ because he knows this stuff inside out. You see with Truman, he’s so fond of writing about the humble and the little and the insulted and injured. But I want him to write about the president of US Steel. I’m sure that he could do wonderful things on the largest scale showing the whole nature of society today.

     I enjoyed Cohn Maclnnes’s Absolute Beginners. Have you read that?

     No, I read, what’s the one before, City of Spades, I liked it very much.

     Again this introduction to All the Conspirators, the angry young man business: you spoke of the pleasure in the sense of a temperamental sympathy between yourself and them, the pleasure of reading Osborne’s plays.

     I admire Osborne very much.

     How about Kingsley Amis?

     I adored That Uncertain Feeling.

     More than Lucky Jim?

     Well, perhaps it was simply that I read it first. But I was reading it in England on a train, and I just dropped the book and roared. The specific thing which perhaps wouldn’t amuse you because it was rather a period joke, but he’s having this terrible scene with a poetic dramatist, and he says, ‘Furthermore, you’ve written the worst play since "Gammer Gurton’s Needle".’ God, I laughed! No — I think Lucky Jim is very good, too; it’s one of the books that I’m going to use when I teach at Santa Barbara this fall.

     What are you going to teach?

     Well, I said that I would gladly talk about American writers, but they said, oh no, you stick to English. I’m only using them as conversation pieces. We’re going to have A Taste of Honey, Look Back in Anger, Lucky Jim. And William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Did you read his science fiction story? Envoy Extraordinary. It’s a paper-back with two other science fiction stories. That’s quite remarkable.

     You spoke of the enormous impact of Forster’s account of the organization of The Counterfeiters way back there, at least as far back as Lions and Shadows. Are you interested in Gide now?

     Well, I’m interested in him as a personality, as a man, as an influence. I often look into his journals. What interested me about the idea in The Counterfeiters was the old thing of the relation between life and art. The thing that is half-way hatched out of life, and just starting to turn into art and the interaction between these two.

     Point counterpoint.

     Yes, I actually don’t like The Counterfeiters very much at all as a novel. It’s one of the things I like least of Gide’s.

     Point counterpoint makes me think of Huxley and the conjunction that is made between your names sometimes. Do you see your careers as in any way similar? How would you differentiate between them?

     I think we’re the most dissimilar creatures alive. I’m very fond of Huxley personally and we’ve been friends now for about twenty years. But Aldous, in the first place, is an intellect, and I’m a purely intuitive person.

     Spender in World Within World spoke of that aspect of you. He said that you had no opinions about anything, that you were wholly and simply interested in people. Does that still hold — did it hold then?

     Well, I see now how right I was, in a way, but I think I said it in those days out of a kind of aggression. I don’t think I meant it quite in the way I would now. Of course I have opinions, in fact very strong opinions, about a lot of quite specific things. But what I think was good, or good for me — the right way for me to do things — was that I can really only understand things through people.

     Would you say that that is the primary difference between yourself and Huxley?

     Yes.

     You spoke of Forster earlier, and it’s quite evident in Lions and Shadows that you thought a great deal of him at one time, that he had revolutionized the novel. Can you speak of any influence he had on your work? One of the characters in All the Conspirators, Victor Page, was said to be modelled on Charles Wilcox, for example.

     Oh, really? Well, he might have been unconsciously modelled on him, that’s perfectly true, because I suppose that certainly the whole thing was tremendously influenced by Howards End, or by all of Forster. Well, I think the great revelation about Forster (and Trilling has said all of this marvellously in his book) is that Forster is a comic writer, and that was our great slogan, Edward Upward’s and mine, when we were young, that we were going to be essentially comic writers, since tragedy was no longer modern.

     Tune down the pitch, play down the big scenes, tea-table it.

     Yes, but now, of course, I see that it’s not by any means necessary to tune down the big scenes.

     Yes, the violence of the first chapter of The World in the Evening is not at all Forsterean.

     For instance, Dostoyevski is essentially a comic writer. I think at least The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest sort of farce ever written. There’s something in Dostoyevsky that you find in the life of Francis of Assisi and that was very much in Ramakrishna. Farce and truth became identical in the most drastic manner in the great scenes with Zossima; and, of course, in the murder, the whole thing is this farce which is heightened to the utmost.

     Was moving to America a political gesture, a cutting off of national affiliation, or anything of that sort?

     Oh no, no, really not at all. People who think I moved to America as a symbolic gesture really aren’t acquainted with my movements before that. I was eternally wandering about. I didn’t live in England properly after I was twenty-four. So that I spent about ten years, first in Germany, then living in all kinds of countries in Europe, then going to China, and then going to America. I really like England a great deal more now. I mean not because I don’t live there now, but because since the war I think it’s a marvellous place, much better in every way.

     Auden and Spender seem to be there more or less for good; at any rate, that’s how it seems at the moment. Do you think you’ll ever move back?

     No, I very much doubt it. Auden, you know, is an American citizen and maintains a residence here. He spends every winter in New York.

     Has living in America changed your attitude towards your work?

     I really don’t know the answer to that. You see, you have to realize that I’ve never lived, since I’ve been grown up, in any place nearly as long as I’ve lived in America. I’m so completely habituated to living in America that everything else seems very remote from me. Now I don’t mean by this that I don’t feel foreign here, because I do. But that I like. And I think it sort of heightens one’s awareness of things to feel a little bit out of it.

     You’ve read Lolita, of course. The travel scenes in it show a kind of awareness of the American scene that could only come from a foreigner; the writer’s stance makes the familiar appear tantalizingly out of focus. It’s something an American couldn’t or at any rate hasn’t done.

     Yes, the travel part was marvellous. And I think I can see in a way how Nabokov managed to bring it off. Of course, I am very distressed by the terrible ugliness of the commercial things, the billboards and the spawning of that awful kind of prefabricated structure that goes up everywhere, but all my life I’ve had a tremendous romantic feeling about the far west, and I used to read about that and think about it and think about the deserts and the mountains years before I ever thought I would live here.

     Do you think that an academic job for a writer, generally speaking, can be harmful?

     I think that that depends tremendously on the spirit in which you do it. It’s exactly the same as writing for the movies. People say that if you write for the movies, you’re sunk. But it entirely depends on the spirit in which you write for the movies. I don’t see why a writer shouldn’t have an intensely academic side to his nature and be interested in academic matters. Tust look at Auden — Auden is the greatest Professor of English Literature in the world. What Auden knows is simply stunning. And he knows it in an academic way; I mean, he knows the whole theory and history and practice of prosody, for instance, and can tell the experts, can set them right on all sorts of matters. But he thrives on it; it is part of his make-up as a writer. It won’t do you any harm necessarily. I ran away from it because I think I realized that it would do me harm. And my only reaction in those days was a sort of simple escape thing. But that’s a criticism of me, not of the academic process. But, on the other hand, there’s the utter sloppiness of that sort of pseudo-Zen approach to everything where ‘You just have to feel it, man.’

     How about that in Kerouac? You said you liked The Subterraneans.

     I do like him, yes, but I mean I don’t think that’s all there is to Kerouac. What is true is that the dry as dust academic thing on the one hand and the sloppy solarplexus thing on the other, end in both cases in utter artistic death. But the writers form a great line in between those two and some are more at one end and some are more at the other.

     You are a pacifist, are you not?

     Yes.

     Do you feel that it is a difficult position to maintain?

     I don’t feel that it’s a difficult position, as far as I’m concerned, to maintain, because I don’t bother about justifying it with a tremendous lot of intellectual reasoning: I just know that I personally ought to do this. And I hope I will have the gumption to go on saying so under any necessary circumstances. As it happened in World War II, when the draft age was raised, I was in a very permissive area outside of Philadelphia, and they took pacifists in their stride at the draft board. I was immediately classified as a conscientious objector. I definitely said all along that I would go into the medical corps as long as they guaranteed that under no circumstances would I have to bear arms. At first they wouldn’t guarantee, but later they did and so I said ‘Very well, I will enlist.’ But by this time they’d lowered the military age again and I was overage and so the problem didn’t arise.

     How do you feel about those who refuse to register for the draft at all, even as conscientious objectors?

     Well, it’s a tremendously difficult question, where you individually decide to draw the line. Take anything — take vegetarianism. Will you eat blades of grass, they’re growing too, etc., etc. Everybody finally finds out that they have to draw the line somewhere. Now I respect thoroughly people who refuse to register for the draft. That’s a position. My particular position is that I will go along to the utmost extent, and as long as the authorities have set up a provision for the conscientious objectors, I feel that I should meet it halfway by registering — you see what I mean? But I would never defend this opinion against somebody who felt otherwise. It’s a purely individual matter.

     Don’t you think pacifism has spread enormously in recent years?

     Oh yes. And whatever people say, in the last resort it’s our only hope. I mean, that this thing spreads to a point where it really will have some influence on the council of nations. One may say that that’s completely unrealistic, but after all what can you do except at least do it yourself? You can’t really do any more than that.

     You are no doubt aware of the kind of generalization made about the writers of the ‘thirties, the group with which you are identified, Auden, Spender, and their famous sympathy with social movements. Do you feel that your present position is a great distance removed from your position of the ‘thirties or not? Do you feel that Auden and Spender, for example, have moved into positions that are not too dissimilar from your own at the moment? Pacifism, for example. Has there been a change?

     Well, neither Auden nor Spender are pacifists, as far as I can understand. I think that in some way in the ‘thirties we rather failed to see that there was going to be a clash between pacifism and our general liberalistic attitudes in other matters. A liberal or whatever you call it, I have always remained and certainly Spender has, and Auden has. In that way we are united still, and there are many, many issues on which we feel the same. And, of course, from time to time one becomes associated with people who have other views in many areas. I belong to the American Civil Liberties Union, which contains all sorts of people. But we agree on general principles, and I guess that both Auden and Spender would subscribe to that, too.

     Would you go along with the ACLU to the extent of defending someone who is personally most unsympathetic to you, like the infamous George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi?

     Oh yes, I think given the principles of the ACLU this action is inescapable. And indeed is very, very important, not so much for itself as to show the integrity of their other actions. Yes, I would support that. Absolutely.

     What are your views on literature which is ‘engaged’ in the service of stating political or other kinds of truth?

     I don’t know that there’s anything you could say for or against it as such. I see clearly now that any kind of stimulus may produce good art or good polemics, which is a form of art. So how can you say that you’re against it or for it?

     Thank you very much.

     Did you really get anything, do you think?

     I haven’t any idea. What’s your own feeling about it?

     Perhaps in places.

     I hope I can find the places.