terist's mind, whether he  be
climbing  a  mountain in New Guinea or crossing a bog in Maine.
Secondly, there is the capture of a very  rare  or  very  local
butterfly--  things  you have gloated over in books, in obscure
scientific reviews, on the splendid plates of famous works, and
that you now see on the wing, in  their  natural  surroundings,
among  plants  and  minerals  that  acquire  a mysterious magic
through the intimate association with the rarities they produce
and support, so that  a  given  landscape  lives  twice:  as  a
delightful  wilderness  in  its own right and as the haunt of a
certain butterfly or moth. Thirdly, there is  the  naturalist's
interest  in  disentangling  the life histories of little-known
insects, in learning about their habits and structure,  and  in
determining  their position in the scheme of classification-- a
scheme  which  can  be  sometimes  pleasurably  exploded  in  a
dazzling  display  of  polemical fireworks when a new discovery
upsets the old scheme and confounds its obtuse  champions.  And
fourthly,  one should not ignore the element of sport, of luck,
of brisk motion  and  robust  achievement,  of  an  ardent  and
arduous  quest  ending  in  the  silky  triangle  of  a  folded
butterfly lying on the palm of one's hand.

     <I>What about the pleasures of writing? </I>

     They correspond exactly to the pleasures of  reading,  the
bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader:
by  the satisfied writer and the grateful reader, or-- which is
the same thing-- by the artist grateful to the unknown force in
his mind that has suggested a combination of images and by  the
artistic reader whom this combination satisfies.

     Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life
so why  analyze  delights  that both sides know? I write mainly
for artists,  fellow-artists  and  follow-artists.  However,  I
could  never  explain  adequately  to  certain  students  in my
literature classes, the aspects of good reading-- the fact that
you read an artist's book not with your heart (the heart  is  a
remarkably  stupid  reader), and not with your brain alone, but
with your brain and spine. "Ladies and gentlemen, the tingle in
the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished  you
to  feel."  I  wonder  if I shall ever measure again with happy
hands the breadth of a lectern and plunge into my notes  before
the sympathetic abyss of a college audience.

     <I>What  is  your reaction to the mixed feelings vented by
one critic in a review which characterized you as having a fine
and original mind,  but  "not  much  trace  of  a  generalizing
intellect,  "and  as  "the typical artist who distrusts ideas"?
</I>

     In  much  the   same   solemn   spirit,   certain   crusty
lepidopterists  have  criticized my works on the classification
of butterflies, accusing me of being  more  interested  in  the
subspecies  and  the subgenus than in the genus and the family.
This kind of attitude is a  matter  of  mental  temperament,  I
suppose.  The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid
of the furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must  deal  in
great  ideas.  Oh, I know the type, the dreary type! He likes a
good yarn spiced with social comment; he likes to recognize his
own thoughts and throes in those of the  author;  he  wants  at
least  one  of  the  characters  to  be the author's stooge. If
American, he has a dash of Marxist blood, and if British, he is
acutely and ridiculously class-conscious; he finds it  so  much
easier  to  write  about  ideas  than  about words; he does not
realize that perhaps the reason he does not find general  ideas
in  a  particular  writer  is that the particular ideas of that
writer have not yet become general.

     <I>Dostoevski, who dealt  with  themes  accepted  by  most
readers  as  universal  in  both  scope  and  significance,  is
considered one of the  world's  great  authors.  Yet  you  have
described  him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. "
Why? </I>

     Non-Russian readers do not realize two  things:  that  not
all  Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that
most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not
as an artist. He was a prophet, a  claptrap  journalist  and  a
slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his
tremendous,  farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his
sensitive murderers and  soulful  prostitutes  are  not  to  be
endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

     <I>Is  it  true  that you have called Hemingway and Conrad
"writers of books for boys"? </I>

     That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is  certainly  the
better  of  the  two; he has at least a voice of his own and is
responsible for that delightful, highly artistic  short  story,
"The  Killers."  And the description of the iridescent fish and
rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is  superb.  But  I
cannot  abide  Conrad's  souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and
shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two
writers can I find anything that I would care to  have  written
myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile,
and  the  same  can  be said of some other beloved authors, the
pets of  the  common  room,  the  consolation  and  support  of
graduate  students,  such  as-- but some are still alive, and I
hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones  are  not  yet
buried.

     <I>What did you read when</I> you <I>were a boy? </I>

     Between  the  ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I
must have read more fiction and poetry-- English,  Russian  and
French--  than  in  any  other  five-year  period of my life. I
relished especially the works of Wells, Poe,  Browning,  Keats,
Flaubert,  Verlaine,  Rimbaud,  Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander
Blok. On another level, my heroes were the  Scarlet  Pimpernel,
Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I <I>was</I>
a  perfectly  normal  trilingual child in a family with a large
library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages
of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke,  Norman
Douglas,  Bergson,  Joyce,  Proust,  and  Pushkin. Of these top
favorites, several-- Poe, Jules  Verne,  Emmuska  Orezy,  Conan
Doyle,  and  Rupert  Brooke--  have lost the glamour and thrill
they held for me. The others  remain  intact  and  by  now  are
probably  beyond  change  as far as I am concerned. I was never
exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my  coevals
have  been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and
of definitely second-rate  Pound.  I  read  them  late  in  the
season,  around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's
house, and not only remained completely  indifferent  to  them,
but  could not understand why anybody should bother about them.
But I suppose that they preserve  some  sentimental  value  for
such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.

     <I>What are your reading habits today? </I>

     Usually  I  read  several books at a time-- old books, new
books, fiction, nonfiction,  verse,  anything--  and  when  the
bedside  heap  of  a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or
three, which generally happens  by  the  end  of  one  week,  I
accumulate  another  pile.  There are some varieties of fiction
that I never touch-- mystery stories,  for  instance,  which  I
abhor,  and  historical  novels.  I  also  detest the so-called
"powerful" novel-- full of commonplace obscenities and torrents
of dialogue-- in fact, when  I  receive  a  new  novel  from  a
hopeful  publisher-- "hoping that I like the hook as much as he
does"-- 1 check first of all how much dialogue there is, and if
it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with  a
bang and ban it from my bed.

     <I>Are   there  any  contemporary  authors  you  do  enjoy
reading? </I>

     I do have a few favorites-- for example, Robbe-Grillet and
Borges.  How  freely  and  gratefully  one  breathes  in  their
marvelous  labyrinths!  I  love  their lucidity of thought, the
purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror.

     <I>Many critics feel that this description applies no less
aptly to your own prose. To what extent do you feel that  prose
and poetry intermingle as art forms? </I>

     Except  that  I started earlier-- that's the answer to the
first part of your question. As to the second: Well, poetry, of
course, includes all creative writing; I have never  been  able
to  see  any  generic  difference  between  poetry and artistic
prose. As a matter of fact, I would be  inclined  to  define  a
good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or
without  the  addition of recurrent rhythm and rhyme. The magic
of prosody may improve upon w^hat we call prose by bringing out
the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there  are  also
certain  rhythmic  patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the
beat of thought rendered by recurrent  peculiarities  of  idiom
and intonation. As in today's scientific classifications, there
is  a  lot  of  overlapping  in our concept of poetry and prose
today. The bamboo bridge between them is the metaphor.

     <I>You have  also  written  that  poetry  represents  "the
mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. "
But  many feel that the "irrational" has little place in an age
when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most
profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree? </I>

     This appearance is very deceptive. It  is  a  journalistic
illusion.  In  point  of  fact,  the greater one's science, the
deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don't believe that any
science  today  has  pierced  any  mystery.  We,  as  newspaper
readers,  are  inclined  to call "science" the cleverness of an
electrician or a psychiatrist's mumbo jumbo. This, at best,  is
applied  science,  and  one  of  the characteristics of applied
science is that  yesterday's  neutron  or  today's  truth  dies
tomorrow.  But  even  in  a  better sense of "science"-- as the
study of visible and palpable nature, or  the  poetry  of  pure
mathematics  and  pure  philosophy--  the  situation remains as
hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin  of  life,  or
the  meaning  of  life, or the nature of space and time, or the
nature of nature, or the nature of thought.

     <I>Man's understanding of these mysteries is  embodied  in
his  concept  of  a  Divine  Being. As a final question, do you
believe in God? </I>

     To be quite candid-- and what I am going  to  say  now  is
something  I  never  said  before,  and  I  hope  it provokes a
salutary little chill-- I know  more  than  I  can  express  in
words,  and  the  little  I  can  express  would  not have been
expressed, had I not known more.