One of my favourite Shakespeare quotations of that period was from the sonnets, "No, I am that I am, and they that level. At my abuses reckon up their own." I gradually realised that one just doesn't have to, one should not concern oneself with what other people say, or what they tell you is your duty. Your duty is what you find out for yourself.


There's always a tremendous sense in my life always of masquerade. I suppose there is in most people's lives. It seems not only in my life...but I see, as it were, the masquerade in my friends' lives. By masquerade I don't mean anything false, I just mean that what the world does to them doesn't seem to jive with my picture of them.


I've always felt, and this does go back into my young manhood as well, that having opinions is a sort of art form. It has its own validity, quite aside from the validity of the opinions themselves, provided they're cogently expressed and forcefully expressed.

I must say, when it comes down to reading literary criticism, I'm not so drawn to the people who exhibit marvellous justice and a kind of perfect equity and good taste. I'd much rather read rampageous and, as many would say, wrong-headed criticism, like for instance, DH Lawrence's studies in classic American literature, or any of these works, because it has passion in it. As I say, it's an art form.

I think what one minds about literary critics much more is that some of them sometimes seem to be really quite unnecessarily vicious. There's a very unfortunate tradition, particularly in this country, in New York, of people who feel that they haven't reviewed a book which they don't like, unless they've impugned the author's whole honour and existence and indeed his right to write at all.



DH: There has been a considerable relaxation of all sorts of things in England now. I mean, the laws relating to homosexuality for instance, have been, as you know, completely changed. Is there the same tolerant attitude now in America?

If you took the whole of the United States into account, you'd find everything from the next best thing to making it legal, all the way down to kids being sent to prison for ten, 15 years. There's some absolutely barbaric statutes in some of the States. You know, life imprisonment. Extraordinary things with regard to it. And I don't mean, now, I'm not now speaking of any interference with minors, I'm speaking of consenting adults. It's incredible. You see, we've one leg in a morass of Puritanism still, and the other leg sort of uncertainly feeling a foothold somewhere else.

DH: And in California?

Well, friends of mine who've been psychiatrists and people who've been concerned with trying to get the law changed have been sort of moderately optimistic. Everybody says it'll be changed, but you see, that's the sort of maddening thing about human beings, that people can all agree it'll be changed and then sit down under it for another ten years for no particular reason. Apathy really. The Hindus always say that's the really terrible thing, is apathy. Apathy is far worse than violence. Because violence can always turn to its opposite, which is love, and constructive action. By violence, I mean destructive violence, but that apathy is a kind of awful swamp in which we wallow until we're pulled out of it.

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