26
PARTISAN REVIEW
certainly read Sterne when I was very young, and reread him
again in college, and then again when reading
The Common Reader.
But I wonder if what you call the "influence of Sterne on Latin
American novelists" is not the other way around : the influence of
Spanish novels of the Golden Age on th.e English novelists of the
eighteenth century (and, vividly, on Latin American writing of
today) makes your proposition material for the nice paradox of
proposing, really, an influence of the Latin Americans on, at
least, the readers of Sterne. Seriously, though, both Sterne and
we share an influence, although I don't think a direct one . As for
Virginia Woolf, yes . Tremendously . The mother of us all, in so
many ways. How avidly I read her! I tried to write my senior the–
sis on her as an undergraduate at Princeton, in 1951. I was not al–
lowed to because she was too recent and there was not "enough or–
thodox criticism on her work" for me to do anything of academic
value.
Christ:
How did it come about that you were so much more open to
foreign influences?
Donoso:
One of the important things, I think, in my case-I can't
speak for others - I don't generalize and theorize because I always
feel that I'm doing an injustice. In my own case, then, it was a
feeling of a lack of having one's own culture . There was no great
feeling of tradition, or at least of the possibility of relating to a tra–
dition or placing myself within a tradition, which was my own in
Chile. In my case it was definitely a feeling that my world, my
class, my country did not give me enough from which I could
learn and which could feed me the things
th~t
I was interested in .
Christ:
So it wasn't a question of affection or exoticism but of under–
nourishment, which fits into the stereotypical notion of under–
development.
Donoso:
I would say so, yes. Then of course there was the very obvi–
ous fact that we all learned languages very young. I learned Eng–
lish when I was five or six at the very most, I think. I was also edu–
cated in an English day school, called "The Grange," where I
studied for almost ten years . Fuentes was there too, because his
father was in the diplomatic service. At home, I had a tutor who,
it turned out, was also the tutor of my future wife, Marfa del
Pilar. In fact, the instructor left our house to take up the position
of instructor for Marfa del Pilar. Of course neither of us knew
about this link until I met Marfa del Pilar in Buenos Aires in
1968, I think it was .
