36
PARTISAN REVIEW
I don't have anything to do with that sort of subject. Again , there
are certain things in everyday life which I feel I'm very much into ,
but ... somehow I can't write about them. I have to go and find
things in my past or in my box of symbols - it's a limited box, after
all- that I can sort of place in different positions and relate to each
other and do something meaningful, if I can.
Christ:
Calaceite, where you have been living, is certainly out of the
hub.
Donoso:
It's monastic. I won't do it again. I've been doing that for five
years, and both my wife and I realize that it's been in a way de–
structive. This trip to the States , all this moving about, has been
good for us . There I get up at ten o'clock in the morning; I put on
my djellaba; I go to my study; I stay there until three or four
o'clock in the afternoon; I have lunch at four in the afternoon; I go
for a walk with my wife ; I pick up my daughter at school; I go
back home; I read or I putter about a little bit around the house; I
write letters - I like writing letters - we have dinner; we go to bed.
At night, in bed, I write diaries - I have a huge number of diary
journals - and meditate in my diary on what I'm going to do the
next day or criticize what I've done today .
Christ:
Something like the Jamesian notebooks?
Donoso:
Again, yes. I have about forty on
The Bird
alone.
Christ:
Do you do much revising?
Donoso:
Oh yes. But with age, it's become sort of mechanical. I mean
I will write one draft straight through without going back
at all,
without revising one single word. I just go PSSSHT as fast as I
can to reach the end. Then I will go back and revise and do a sec–
ond draft which will be probably much longer than the first draft
... much longer, sometimes twice as long, which is revision and
also a question of montage, of cutting things and placing them in
a different order, of pruning things out, putting other things in,
and so on. I do that and the novel swells up to double what it was.
And then I do a third draft, which again reduces it. So the first
draft is shorter than the second, and the second is longer than the
other two.
Christ:
While you were revising
The Bird,
did you change its title?
Donoso:
The book was called, at the beginning,
El ultimo Azcoitia,
"The Last of the Azcoftias," and then it was an elegant tale of
some twenty pages , very simple and classically constructed.
When I read it to a friend of mine, she said: "Oh, but this is com–
plete imagination. This doesn't exist in reality." "What do you
