SEVEN QUESTIONS
41
I.
Usable for what, cannot worry about the future of American writing,
the present is enough, and any American is American.
2.
An
audience is pleasant
if
you have it, it is flattering and flattering is
agreeable always, hut if you have an audience the being an audience is
their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to
their own business.
3.
Mter all if it is written and presumably what you write is written
before it is criticised then criticism is bound to come too late always. To
the rest of the question it is the same.
4.
I suppose if I had had to ma
7
ke a living I should have, I do not know,
how can you tell.
5.
I am not interested.
6.
Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really,
it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real
writer is really interested in politics.
7. It does not seem possible for any of you to realise that most probably
there will not be another general European war, the more America thinks
there
is
going to be one the more suspicious the continent gets and the less
likely they are to fight. Anyway they are not at all likely to do so hut if
they were to then the writers would have to fight too like anybody else,
some will like it and some will not.
William Carlos Williams:
I.
Yes, most assuredly, I am conscious in everything I write of a usable
past,
a past as alive in its day a11 every moment is today alive in me: Work
therefore as different from mine as one period can be different from
another, but in spite of that preserving between the two an identity upon
which I feed. In all work in any period there is a part that is the life of it
which relates to whatever else is alive, yesterday, today and forever. To
discover that in past work makes that work important to me. How can we
say
that the work of Henry James is more relevant to the present and
