SOURCE: "An Interview with Brigid Brophy," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, Spring, 1976, pp. 151-70.

[In the following interview conducted on July 17, 1975, Brophy discusses her early career, the influence of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Ronald Firbank, and Mozart on her works, her position as a feminist, and her association with the Writers' Action Group.]

Novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist, Brigid Brophy is an Anglo-Irishwoman who lives in England. Her childhood was spent in London, yet, since her father, the novelist John Brophy, was fervently Irish, she visited Ireland frequently and was brought up on Irish ideas. As a child she appeared briefly in a film, was bathed by T.E. Lawrence, and wrote verse dramas from the age of six onwards. After attending Oxford for four terms, Brophy was, in effect, expelled for indiscretions. She then took a variety of clerical jobs, published a volume of short stories, and began work on her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape (1953). While writing it she met Michael Levey, who is now her husband and director of the National Gallery. With their daughter Kate, Levey and Brophy live in an elegant four-room flat on the Old Brompton Road in London, where the interview took place on July 17, 1975.

Since 1953, when her first volume was published, Brophy's output has been extensive: six novels, two collections of short prose fiction, one play, four nonfiction works, a critical collection written in collaboration with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, and numerous articles. Her best-known novels are The King of a Rainy Country (1962), The Finishing Touch (1963), and In Transit (1969). Black Ship to Hell (1956), her first nonfiction work, is a lengthy treatment of Freudianism and rationalism which, combined with her classicism, are the underpinnings of her critical stance.

Her essays, both topical and critical, treat issues and the arts from a psychological and rational standpoint. In England Brophy is known both for her fiction and as a proponent of human and animal rights who writes and speaks out in favor of vegetarianism, birth control for animals and birds, prison reform, freedom from censorship, and a change in attitudes toward marriage and divorce. Her essays are both whimsical and penetrating: she has analyzed Mickey Mouse as a modern folk-hero and animated phallic symbol.

What Brophy considers to be the best, or most representative, of her articles are collected in the nonfiction volume, Don't Never Forget (1966). An allusion to a phrase in one of Mozart's letters (written, in broken English, to an English-speaking friend), the title reflects Brophy's love for Mozart's music and her eclecticism. To varying degrees, her works all evince a continuing emphasis upon art, in the broadest sense. She uses musical patterns and shifting tempos, cinematic or photographic effects, and architectural images—most notably, baroque—to enrich the texture of her fiction.

Although her approach to fiction and concern with human and animal rights have remained fairly constant, her works are not all of a piece, which, she thinks, may be one reason for her not being well-known, especially in the United States. Hackenfeller's Ape explores a number of themes, among them original sin, the romantic viewpoint, and experimentation on animals for scientific purposes; The Burglar (1968) treats sexual puritanism and society's attitudes toward criminals; The King of a Rainy Country concerns a young boy and girl who undertake a literal and figurative search for a woman who represents their mother; and so on. Her most recent work, The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl, subtitled A Novel and Some Fables (1968), indicates her debt to Shaw, as do the preface to, and stage directions for, The Burglar. Equally influential on Brophy's style and aesthetics is Ronald Firbank, the subject of her nonfiction work, Prancing Novelist (1973), and the stylistic model for The Finishing Touch.

Although she claims not to be totally Irish and, like Yeats, has lost faith with the Irish revolutionary movement, she retains an Irish drollness of expression and speech. Unfortunately, an interview such as this diminishes the satiric force of her diction in phrases such as "The British Museum has not made me an offer." Her voice, although soft, is musical. She sits very still, thinks about a question, utters a characteristic "ahh" or "ummm," then plunges into a complex sentence structure.

[Dock:] Having read your article, "My Mother," I have a fairly clear impression of her personality. About your father, I know little other than that he was a "middlebrow novelist."

[Brophy:] I was so fond of him that, although ten years have passed since his death, I still don't find it very easy to talk about him. I got on with him, by nature, very much better than with my mother. We had in common the fact that, obviously, the arts meant more to us than anything else. He was a very generous, very easygoing person. We argued and disagreed furiously about literature the whole time, but, as I say, had this in common, that it mattered desperately to us both. What else ought I to say about him?

If you don't want to say more, fine.

He was a very remarkable person in very many ways and a lot of people have asked me why I have never written about him, but I don't think this would be emotionally possible.

In the story "Fordie," which is in Crown Princess, a collection of your early stories, are any of the characters—Fordie, Philip, or Elgin—based on real persons?

I shouldn't think so. I think it's probably true to say that, with one exception, I have never written anything based on a real person, though obviously little pieces of real experience get used. But I have certainly never attempted to put—and I don't think I have ever even inadvertently succeeded in putting—a real person into a book.

What would that one exception be?

I wrote a novel called The King of a Rainy Country, in which there is a young man called Neale; that was a deliberate, close attempt—definitely, though with all his externals disguised—to make a portrait of somebody I had been involved with.

Was he the "Jungian"? You said in an essay that you were once attached to a Jungian, and that later the relationship ended with your disliking both the Jungian and Jung.

That is very shrewd of you. Yes, indeed, he was, or is, the character on whom Neale is based.

Would you care to tell his name, or not?

It is probably better that I shouldn't; he is in no way famous, but I wouldn't care to suffer his return into my life after all these years, in the form of a libel action.

You published an article entitled "The Rococo Seducer" two years before The Snow Ball appeared in print. How long do you usually work on each novel?

I have no idea how long the ideas for a novel germinate: probably a very, very long time. The actual writing I usually do very quickly, but one of the stories in that first collection—the stories that you spoke of, which I published when I was twenty-two or twenty-three—I can remember writing an early version of when I was fifteen, during my Latin class in school. So, things do go on for a very long time in the mind. But they don't for me go on for very long on paper.

Do you remember which story that was?

It was a story called "The Late Afternoon of a Faun."

Ah, yes. I can see how it could be an escape from Latin class, in a way.

It was, indeed, classically inspired. I was a person who read Latin and Greek at Oxford, because of a passionate love of Greek. At that time I disliked Latin very much indeed, but one couldn't do Greek without Latin, so I had to struggle through it. And, indeed, through exploring the nonclassical periods of Latin literature, I came to have much more respect for the Latin language than I set out with.

How long did it take you to write Black Ship to Hell? The reason I ask is that I was wondering if you had those ideas in mind when you wrote The King of a Rainy Country.

Yes, I think I probably did quite consciously have the ideas in mind; I certainly did unconsciously. It took me a long time to write. I wrote a complete version of it first in a completely undramatized manner, just as if I had been writing a statistical report, or something. I had difficulty finding a publisher for it, and so on, and came to see that this escape wouldn't do, that if one were going to write nonfiction, one couldn't just write it as though one were concocting a report. So then I rewrote the whole book, at a time when I had a very young child around; thus it was a very happy book to write, but it was very fraught, physically, because I had this thing crawling around on the desk at the time!

Yes, there is that gap between 1956 and 1962, between The King of a Rainy Country and Black Ship to Hell; were you more or less taking care of Kate the whole time and working on the book when you could?

Yes. I had a gap, a sort of emotional gap, anyway—a thing I used to have in those days about writing—I no longer do. And then, in that intermittent gap I had the child, and this proved to be sufficient occupation for the time being.

Do you type, or do you write rough drafts longhand? How many drafts do you write?

I write the whole thing in longhand, meticulously. I can't actually even write a letter straight onto the typewriter, partly because I touch-type. I earned my living as a typist and therefore the eye constantly seeks the copy to copy from, so I have to have one, as I say, to write a letter.

In your article "Sex-'n'-Violence" you say that psychoanalysis, by advancing the concept of normality, has hindered the advance of sexual tolerance. Have your attitudes toward psychoanalysis changed significantly since the publication of Black Ship to Hell?

I don't think so. I think that, as Freud himself recedes in history, it becomes easier to pick on the things which were incidental (and a lot of what he said about women comes under that heading) and to, as it were, write them off. At the same time I think my impression of the absolutely vital, Aristotelian-sized importance of what he discovered just grows stronger and stronger; hardly a day goes by without some incident which simply makes one say over and over again, "He was right! He was right!" If one goes to a committee meeting somebody will betray what he is really thinking by a slip of the tongue.

So, then, your contention is with psychoanalysis, and not with Freud; your contention is with his practitioners?

I differ from Freud; he was superman, but he wasn't super-superman. He couldn't instantly distinguish between where he'd picked up the accepted ideas of his time and where the truth was: so, once or twice, he went wrong. But I think it was, to revert to this normality thing, inevitable that he should take over that concept of normality from medicine—he was a doctor—and take over the concept of, "If it's normal, it's healthy, it functions," and this is not an adequate concept to deal with human beings in society, because one has to take in "what it ought to be," as well. I think he wasn't always altogether clear about this, but he was so good at clearing through the undergrowth, that one is not accusing him.

In Black Ship to Hell you observe that the eighteenth century failed to produce a "penetrating literary aesthetic because it lacked a free and vital theater." You have also said that you began writing plays at the age of six. Why is it, then, that you have written many more novels than plays?

Oh, because nobody would put the plays on, as simple as that. They put one on, and it was a gross commercial failure.

The Burglar?

Yes. There have been quasi-bites ever since, towards later ones, with the stipulation to me, "If you rewrote the whole of Act Two, and changed all the male characters into female characters, and moved the whole setting from Sweden to Australia, then…." But nothing serious. I feel very attracted by the theater, but I know now, what I didn't know at the time of The Burglar, that the author's responsibility extends all the way. You've got to go to every rehearsal; you've got to teach the actors how to act in the style you want; when they say, "I can't say the line," you've got to explain to them the idea of the line as it's written; you've got to tell the director the pace at which it should go; you've got to do everything in the theater. And I'm not very good at doing these personal things in personal relationships to people I don't know very well. Therefore, I prefer to dodge out of this responsibility.

It would be easier, then, if you did a movie because, once done, it would be forever on film, as your books are forever on paper.

It would be very nice to do a movie, I must say!

You mentioned in the preface to The Burglar that you had written a play, or were about to write a play, called "Libretto" or "The Libretto." Was it ever published, and if so, where? I haven't been able to find it.

No, it was never published, because it was never performed. In England one can't publish a play that hasn't been performed.

How early did you begin reading Ronald Firbank? Do you remember when it was?

No. I read one novel, The Artificial Princess, as a child; I guess there was a copy in my home. I don't know at what age, because I began reading everything at the age of about five.

Part Two of the preface to The Burglar begins with your describing the writer of your works as a "masochistically-inclined non-narcissist." In other articles, as well, you speak of your masochism. Could you please elaborate: do you see writing as a masochistic act?

No, except insofar as it's very painful, but then creating a work in any medium is very painful, I imagine. No, I don't think writing is, in itself, masochistic. I think that one might guess the masochism in my personality from the fact that I practice criticism as well as creative writing, which would suggest that the critical faculty was very sharpened and was always ready to turn on the creator.

Have you read Simon Raven's insulting article, "Brophy and Brigid," in which he maintains that the "intelligent writer of clear masculine prose is Brophy," whereas Brigid is the "faddy and finicking" female? That review was in the Spectator, 1966.

I may have read it, yes; it doesn't sound unfamiliar.

I ask because, in In Transit, there are those constant flagellation scenes where "he" is flagellating or whipping "her." And I was wondering if, perhaps, you were parodying Raven's comment at that point.

Not consciously, but I recognize it; obviously, I've read it. So you could be right.

I wondered if you were, perhaps, parodying his views entirely, parodying the idea that the male is the dominant type. It wouldn't necessarily be that you would have read his review, but I thought you might be splitting yourself into the "he" and the "she," with the masochistic writer being beaten by this ascendant, logical type?

It would be amusing! But I don't think that I would sufficiently accept that the male is the logical one, the female illogical and subservient.

Of course, I meant that the split would be a parody, because you've said in your essays that women are men's equals.

Well, it may be an unconscious parody; you may well be right, but I was certainly not aware of it.

Hunter Davies conducted a personal interview with you in your home in March, 1974, and from that I gathered several facts about your life, about your relationship with your husband, and so forth. My question is, superficially, Flesh and The Snow Ball seem to be based on your experiences: the lovers' meeting each other at a New Year's Eve party in The Snow Ball; Marcus' sense of being lost, then "finding himself" in marriage in Flesh, and so on. You have said that you once worked for a firm which sold pornographic books, as does Susan in The King of a Rainy Country. Did you ever guide a tour of Americans through the Continent, as does Susan?

No, the guided tour was pure fiction. I once worked for a firm which sold "remaindered" books, some of which were pornographic, but it wasn't exactly a pornographic book-seller, as it were. The whole of Flesh is pure fiction. Marcus bears no resemblance whatever to my husband, and I trust I bear none to Marcus' wife.

The meeting at a New Year's Eve party in The Snow Ball was a case of entirely unconscious autobiography, because that was a very grand party in fancy dress, and part of the point of the book was that these were two not-rich people, in among rich people. The party where I, in fact, met my husband, was very far from grand, and nobody was in fancy dress, and so on. But obviously, there was an element of autobiography in it; it was entirely unconscious until a man that we both knew remarked on it to me one evening, and I said "My God!" So I was actually unaware of that.

Their meeting at a New Year's Eve party is convenient from a classical point of view; New Year's Eve marks the changing of the year, the time of upheaval, and so forth, so I can see why, structurally, you'd want to do it that way.

Yes, it had many determinants, and my relationship to my husband has not been so fleeting and unhappy as that relationship was, thank God.

Fordie, in the story of the same name, is womanish (he wears a shawl and is termed "dear mother"); the professor in Hackenfeller's Ape sings the Countess' song; the narrator of In Transit is confused about his or her sexual identity; and the choral pitches in In Transit are such that males sing soprano, women bass. Could you please comment on your purpose in merging, reversing, or reworking sexual stereotypes so frequently? for blending male and female stereotypic characteristics?

Yes, first, a simple Freudian recognition of the basic bisexuality of everybody. Second, a conscious desire to counteract the mythology of literary criticism at the moment, which so often cries that only women can write about women, and only men can write about men. One constantly reads that there are no good parts for women in the theater, because there aren't enough women dramatists. The point is, that Hedda Gabler and Cleopatra were not created by women dramatists. I have a feeling that this is not only a mistaken approach to sex, but also a mistaken mythology of basic mental differences between the sexes, which I don't accept exists. I feel that that mythology is a denial of imagination, which I think one has to counter.

The whole purpose of fiction is that the writer (and thereby the reader) is transported into some form of life which is absolutely different from his own; and to be transported, if one is female, to a male character, and vice versa, is a terribly light transposition: this is a very small flight, compared to what the imagination can do. Consequently, I feel a certain obligation to insist on the mental interchangeability of the sexes, as well as believing that this is basically true.

Yes, Virginia Woolf's conception of androgyny. You don't like her novels, though, do you, as a rule?

No, I don't, I'm afraid. I wish I could; I think she was ever-so-right about ever-so-many things, but she just doesn't, for me, take off as a novelist.

In a 1965 essay, "The Unmentionable Subject," you said that the subject on which you had written and about which you had thought the most, was art; second, human and animal rights; and third, sex. Since then, has the order changed at all?

No, all that has happened is that the first has slightly blended in my life with the second, in that the last three years of my life have very largely been given to a struggle for authors' rights.

With Maureen Duffy and the Writers' Action Group?

Yes. We are still very deeply engaged in a campaign for Public Lending Right, and we are also engaged in a trade union for writers, and in generally insisting on authors' rights, so this, I would say, is a practical merging of the first and the second. A trade union for writers is not a very sexy occasion, so to that extent, the third has had to recede.

I see the first and the third as part of each other, actually; in In Transit, sex and art are interwoven; the book continually weaves in the pornographic "sub-art" form.

Yes. Would you say that human rights are involved for or against pornography?

Human rights would be for pornography.

Yes.

At times you have expressed a fascination with "American" as a language. Yet you have also said that the American language is "licking the brains out of [your] native civilisation." Would you elaborate, please?

I think the threat to the English language from the southern section of the United States has slightly receded. There was a time, which obviously began during the war, when, I think, there was a genuine danger that English-English was going to be replaced by United States-English. You will note how pedantically I call it "United States-English," not "American-English," which shows a simple, Gore Vidal-like objection to United States imperialism. I have always wanted to make some public reference to Castro as the American president, to show that he's an American too.

I think that the danger to our language from United States-English is probably now past, but there's a whole spectrum of bureaucratese which issues from the European economic community, which is not a language at all; it's not the idiom of any of the countries in Europe: this is the new danger.

We call it "duckspeak."

"Duckspeak." I don't know, I think ducks are perhaps more articulate. At least, I don't think they make their noises in order to obscure thought.

If you were thinking about commenting on Castro as an American president, and if you were going to step into that arena, I was wondering why you have never said much about the political situation in Ireland. In the article, "Am I an Irishwoman?" you do discuss the Irishman's feeling of being a second-class citizen, his feeling about taking on English, which is not quite his own language, and yet not being an Irishman; yet I wonder why you have never commented on the situation in Northern Ireland in an article?

I have commented on it, in fiction, actually, though in a very disguised way, in a book called The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl.

Since I wrote that essay about being quasi-Irish, I have, emotionally, withdrawn totally from Ireland, and I was amused to notice that certain self-reproaches still happen about this. The last twenty-third of April we of the Writers' Action Group staged a demonstration of writers outside the Ministry of the Arts, in Belgrave Square, demanding PLR [Public Lending Right]. We chose to do this on the twenty-third of April because it's both the putative birthday of Shakespeare and St. George's Day, and St. George is the patron saint of England. We asked two actors to dress up as St. George and the dragon; we took a bunch of red roses (red roses for England) to the Minister of the Arts, and said, "Would you please rescue English literature?" The speakers at this rally each wore a red rose, for England, on St. George's Day. And as I stood on the platform, a sudden terrible arrow went through me: "You are not English; you shouldn't be wearing a red rose; St. George's Day is nothing to you; you were brought up to celebrate St. Patrick's Day." And I was very amused that this feeling could still, from one's childhood, reach out and affect me.

Juliet Mitchell, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, discusses Freud's using the Zeus-Kronos-Uranus myth to "supplement the Oedipal legend" in Freud's "recreation of man's phylogenetic and ontogenetic history." In Black Ship to Hell you discuss the Diana Triformis myth. The three women in The King of a Rainy Country—Cynthia, Helena, and Susan—seem to embody the Diana trinity, and Neale and Susan both seem to be working through Oedipal conflicts. Could you please comment on your reasons for using a mythical framework or pattern for The King of a Rainy Country?

I think the reasons are practical. One has only the furniture of one's own mind, and I am, as I say, a classical scholar (or I was) and a Freudian; given that each layer of furniture is reinforced by the other, I had no alternative. I don't think that it is very insisted-on; but you were absolutely right to detect it.

Part of my question concerns the fact that some writers have criticized Freud for not analyzing sufficiently women's myths. Were you trying to add on to the body of Freudian myth-analysis by presenting, in novel form, a working-out of the women's part of the Zeus-Kronos-Uranus myth? There are very few characters in that novel. There's Neale, of course, yet he's actually another facet of Susan (this is my impression); he says he has her past; they have pasts in common; both are looking for a mother. Then there's Philip, and he seems to be a mere appendage to Helena.

Yes, he's not there. I think that this effect may be the result of, in me, the egotism of youth. Or, if I were lucky, it might be an attempt to actually depict the egotism of youth. It is a first-person novel; it's the only one that contains any consciously, deliberately, autobiographical material. It was probably a rather belated attempt on my part to outgrow that material and distance it. Whether it was consciously an attempt to add an Electra side to the Oedipus, I don't know. However, whether it was conscious or unconscious, you were right in detecting that that's what it does.

You describe the style, the idiom, of The Finishing Touch as "superficially Firbankian." Yet the content and plot, to me, seem to owe something also to Colette, specifically Claudine at School. Would you agree?

Certainly, I think the plot does, and the atmosphere. This is another interesting example of how hard it is for people to believe that one's work is entirely nonautobiographical. The number of people, starting with the publisher of the book, who asked which finishing school I had been at, you would hardly believe.

The publisher was terribly worried, because he took it for an absolutely straightforward account of the finishing school I had been at; he was terribly worried about libel. I assured him I had never been at a finishing school in my life, and had no idea, even, what they were like. He found this very hard to believe, and indeed sent somebody to the South of France to search for finishing schools that might take an action against him.

Yes, it might well owe a lot to Colette, and to the Claudine books in particular, which I am curiously fond of, absurd as they are, in a way. They contain, I think, some of her most directly autobiographical, in an emotional sense, material.

But when you wrote the book you weren't consciously saying, "Claudine at School depicts events when the two headmistresses were young; let's see what happens when they're a bit older and when the weaker one has the upper hand." In other words, you weren't consciously reworking Colette's material and taking the book one step further, from a different perspective?

I don't think so, because what I consciously had in mind was a real-life situation which concerned an educational institution in London (which I will not name), but a very much higher educational institution than the one in the book, in London, which had a male director and a female vice-director who was terribly gone on him. He was extremely elegant and fey, and as queer as a coot. And this extremely tweedy, down-to-earth lady, his deputy, was romantically so absolutely besotted by him, that this situation had for a long time amused Michael and me very much. This was, as it were, the germ of the book. Michael caught chicken pox from our daughter, had to stay at home for three weeks, and was very bored. He felt terribly ill for the first twenty-four hours, and then felt better, but he couldn't go out, for fear of infecting people. So I produced something to amuse him.

But, of course, in the process you changed the characters from a woman and a man to two women. I think that makes quite a difference to the reader.

Yes. It would have been very hard to create a scandal from a woman and a man; therefore it had to be changed.

You have criticized Simone de Beauvoir for her pedantry, for being a plodder, for her deficient style and content—specifically, for missing Freud's point. Are there any feminists, other than de Beauvoir, that you do admire or favor?

What is a feminist? I mean, there are many women writers that I admire, and I certainly admire any woman who gets on with the job as though she were not a woman. I may have a very slight dislike for, and contempt for, women who make a profession out of being women, as indeed I have for Frenchmen living in England who make a profession out of being Frenchmen, or anything of that kind. I am a feminist, of course, but there is no sense in which I would accept that women are anything but the total equals of men. Perhaps I have the feeling that, if one has no subject matter except feminism, then one is trading on nothing, as though one were to make a career out of proclaiming that grass is green.

You don't think, then, that Greer's The Female Eunuch, which you seem not to mind, in "Everybody's Lib," has any validity for the women or men who haven't had their "consciousnesses raised," as the cliché has it?

This is always a difficult matter: should one pick out these things that need liberation? Something in me half-believes that it is better to exemplify than to preach. No, this is unfair, perhaps. But the world has Jane Austen and George Eliot, two minds which will demonstrate to anybody who is open to demonstration that a female mind is not necessarily inferior to a male mind. I basically think that the point of Women's Lib is better made by having more Jane Austens and George Eliots, and high-powered civil servants and so on, than by constantly reiterating a truism when you have nothing else to say. There are a number of reputations which are open to the question, "Suppose you'd been born a man?" Would we ever have heard of them? Suppose she or he had been born heterosexual; would we ever have heard of heard or him? And this can beg the very question that they're trying to preach.

Still, I'm not sure about this one; I may be being unfair. And indeed, I think one has to say that feminism, and indeed Gay Lib, have done things that were not done simply by people simply living their lives and being talented. Therefore I am being unfair, though it may turn out that the journalists' fashion for Women's Lib—and, to some extent, for Gay Lib—may suddenly pass, leaving us exactly where we were before. Journalists are incredibly without memory, and without historical sense. For example, when Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon, they announced that this was the first black person who'd ever won Wimbledon; this was not true.

Yes, I read your letter to the Times the other day.

I made a feminist point about it in the Times, which was unfair, but I wanted them to print it. In fact, the real point to be made is against journalists, because journalists have only just heard of black power; this is an "in" thing. And they believe it has happened only in the past three years. (Journalists' memories never go back beyond three years.) This is untrue, because, in fact, when Althea Gibson won Wimbledon, it was an enormous feat; it was very much greeted by black people as being a great victory for them. And of course there was a movement for the liberation of black people 'way back in 1956. It's just that, as I say, journalists believe that black power, Women's Lib, Gay Lib, are entirely new phenomena! and this strange absence of historical sense in journalists could mean that, when they suddenly start thinking of Women's Lib as old hat, we will find that it hasn't advanced things, socially.

In your essay, "The Importance of Mozart's Operas," you say that, in Don Giovanni, Mozart produced "one of the world's imperfect masterpieces … an eternal enigma," as a result of using, unconsciously, autobiographical material. In Transit is, for me, somewhat of an enigma. I can pick out some of the elements: pornography, musical tempos, confusion about oneself in relation to others, plus a parody of detective fiction, but the pattern or design is unclear. Could you please explain your intent and, if possible, comment on the autobiographical material, the circumstances that pushed you into writing it? In an essay you say that it depicts the "impulse to fiction," but I have no idea of how the pattern works.

The pattern is about disintegration of accepted routines. We "intellectually structure our world" (I'm sorry about the jargon) by certain received truths which we think to be true, in various moods. So when the "I" character in In Transit deliberately decides to miss the plane for which she or he has a ticket, the timetable is disrupted, and this is the first disintegration of the rulebook.

In Transit is about a series of disintegrations of rulebooks, including the sexual stereotypes, ending with the question of whether Aristotelian logic might disintegrate, whether we are mistaken in thinking that a thing cannot be both X and not-X, whether we are mistaken in thinking that the syllogistic argument is valid. There are a good many passages referring to Aristotelian logic in the book. And then, going from the logical proposition to the sentence, the book poses the question of whether the accepted Western sentence structure (subject-verb-object) is also disintegrating. When I say that these rules are disintegrating, I mean that what is being questioned is, do they reflect any necessary truths, or are they entirely arbitrary?

The structure of the book, to express these disintegrations or questionings, is the first instance of my trying to write in symphonic form. Everything else I have written (and I think this would probably be true, even if I write an article of 2000 words) is structured on the concerto, in three movements, with a one, two, one-A structure within each movement. In Transit is an attempt to write in four movements, and with a more complicated development of each theme within each movement. I don't know that it succeeds.

The symphonic structure I had in mind was Brahms's. I don't know; some days I think he was a very great composer, and other days I think he was just a windy old Victorian. But he certainly is a composer who affects me very strongly, whether for good or for bad. And he also is a composer whom one sees as having had the ability to create disintegration: sometimes he builds toward an orchestral climax, and what is structurally a climax, but you have the impression that it's also about falling apart. It's lost faith, and he's questioning, "Is this a tune? Is it the same as the other tune, or is it different?" I feel he was full of self-doubt, and that is why he was my model for the structure of In Transit.

Weren't you more or less trying to create that same sort of disintegration of rhythm in The Snow Ball, where most of the descriptions start out as neutral, if not positive (I am thinking of the cherubs all over the house), and gradually, within the passage, the description becomes quite negative—or was that not your intent?

Yes, this is true, but I didn't attempt, in The Snow Ball, to disintegrate the actual structures of thought. I only disintegrated one person's thought, with a few persons peripheral to her emotional structures. That was the main fact, the fact that people die, which, I would agree, is the ultimate in disintegration. But in The Snow Ball there is not the disintegration of an actual intellectual world, as distinct from one person's world.

Yes, it seems to me that in The Snow Ball the furnishings were disintegrating. One character makes the comment that the antique furniture probably looked better two hundred years ago.

I think this disintegration is there; my fear about civilization is that, if we can no longer make beautiful furniture—and, more to the point, beautiful buildings—which we hardly can, nowadays, the few beautiful ones that we haven't knocked down are not going to last us very much longer.

In Prancing Novelist you maintain that, today, private incomes are drying up in Western countries, thus decreasing the chances of a great artist's having income sufficient to support himself or herself. The answer is, you say, "greater generosity, spreading the money more widely." Given England's economic situation, how would you propose this be done?

Firstly, obviously, by paying authors for the lending of their books in public libraries, which is more important in this country than in any other Western country, for the simple reason that we have a larger public library service than anybody else. Not even proportionately to our population, but absolutely, we have a larger one. Therefore the loss to authors is even greater in this country than anywhere else. By adding four million pounds to the central government's budget per year, you could spread the money around perfectly justly to authors whose books are borrowed. Some of them are authors who also sell well, but a lot of them are not, because 73 percent of all adult borrowing in British public libraries is borrowing of fiction, but the number of novelists who are best sellers, and make a lot of money from sales, is very small. Therefore there are a great number of novelists who make very little money, but are heavily borrowed. To pay a Public Lending Right to them, would make an enormous difference, especially for fiction, but not only for fiction.

That is the first method. The other method is an increase in state patronage; of all the money spent on the arts in this country, only 1 percent goes to literature. So an increase in state patronage to writers would make quite a lot of difference.

Would it extend to dead writers? Sometimes a writer doesn't make any money during her or his lifetime; would it extend to a widower or widow?

This is our intention, that it shouldn't extend for the full fifty years after death of the copyright period, because if you are, as this country is, short of money, it is perfectly legitimate to say, should we support grandchildren or ninth cousins? But we certainly intend, the writers intend, or the government intends, that it should be applicable to widowers and widows and to children under twenty-one.

Are there any works of yours which, now, you wish you hadn't published?

Yes. My first book, a volume of short stories, The Crown Princess, which I do not mention in any reference books, and have to that extent suppressed. I would like the opportunity to rewrite and improve them all, but no, I'm not positively ashamed of any of them, except that.

Why that?

I think it was a book written by a little girl trying to be good, producing what was expected, and the only story I would except is the one called "The Late Afternoon of a Faun," which was, as I said earlier, the earliest story in it, and which is the only one, it seems to me, to have anything. The others seem to me manufactured, written for a certain middlebrow market, to be life imposed on me, not me on life.

You describe your father as a "middlebrow novelist"; would you say you are high, middle, or lowbrow, as a novelist?

I would say that I try to write to the top of my intellectual ability, and I try never to baffle readers deliberately, because that is simply pretentiousness. But if, when I have put it as clearly as I can, it baffles them or puts them off, that is too bad; it isn't they that will suffer, it is I, because they won't buy my books. To that extent, I suppose one has, using the word I don't very much like, to say "highbrow."

Are you working on a novel right now?

No, alas. In intervals I've been bludgeoning the British government. I'm rewriting a book about Aubrey Beardsley, whom I've already written about. It's taking a rather long time, partly to write, and partly because there's quite a lot of new material, new facts. I've discovered the true version of previously wrongly accepted facts, which is nice, but I wish I had more leisure to do it in.

I am also about to publish my first excursion into writing for children. There are two stories which are to be published in a volume in the spring of 1976 and which will at the same time be read on BBC television. They are for children, but not, I hope, exclusively for children. They concern a very nasty and self-regarding character called Pussy Owl.

Do you save your manuscripts or give them to the British Museum?

The British Museum has not made me an offer. I keep them in a plastic box underneath the bed, which prevents them from cluttering the place up. It also prevents Maureen Duffy's dog, who spends a lot of time here (because Maureen is here a great deal of the time, running Writers' Action Group with me), from getting under the bed, which used to be her chief delight during the days that she spent here. She got under once, and couldn't get out again; she and I had quite a half-an-hour's struggle. She scrabbled at my manuscripts, I scrabbled at her; eventually we got her out.

What do you think of Norman Mailer?

It is always very necessary to protest masculinity in the United States. There has always to be a figure: there was Hemingway, and now there is Norman Mailer, whose very name is so very amusing in that connection. I think this is something which is missing from English literary life, unless one says that the thirties tradition of cricket and poets is an assertion of the same thing, which it may be.

What about the nonliterary life? Do you think that English men are more advanced in terms of treating women as equals, than are American men?

I haven't been in the United States for a long time, though, obviously, I have met a lot of people from the United States over here. I think—very slightly, yes. If one goes about one's own affairs or business in this country, I don't think that most men will particularly notice that one is a woman. Obviously, they notice, but I think they got over the fact of this a long time ago, and I don't think these descriptions apply in the United States, although I may be wrong.