Writers at Work [antikvár]

How Writers Write Thb is the best series of interviews with writers of our time that I have read in English. The statement, though sweeping, isn't quite so eulogistic as it sounds. As compared with Continental Europeans, the English since Boswell, who was Scottish, and the Americans from the beginning have seldom been good at literary interviews. Everything in their background has been against the development of the form. Editors haven't been willing to give it much space because of a probably justified feeling that their public was not interested in literary problems. Authors have been embarrassed or reticent, often at the wrong places, and interviewers by and large have been incompetent. I can think of recent exceptions, but most of the interviewers either have had no serious interest in literature or else have been too serious about themselves. Either they have been reporters with little knowledge of the author's work and a desire to entrap him into making scandalous remarks about sex, politics, and God, or else they have been ambi-tious writers trying to display their own sophistication, usnally at the expense of the author, and listening chiefly to their own voices. In this book the literary conversations are of a different order, perhaps because of the changing times. The interviewers belong to a new génération that has been called "silent," though a better 3