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.
What about the pleasures of writing?
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.
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"?
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.
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?
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.
Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad
"writers of books for boys"?
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.
What did you read when you were a boy?
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 was
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.
What are your reading habits today?
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.
Are there any contemporary authors you do enjoy
reading?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Man's understanding of these mysteries is embodied in
his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you
believe in God?
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.