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PARTISAN REVIEW
smoke or drink. I write only in the morning, and I jog a bit before
I begin to write.
Later he spoke to me about aesthetic creation almost as if it
were a biological act. For him there are impulses and instincts that
determine the direction of a given page in the same way a physical
reaction might.
Vargas Llosa was about to leave for London, where, he said,
he would remain incommunicado writing a new play. He wanted to
buy a few Spanish-language books before leaving.
It
is a strange expe–
rience - not one I necessarily recommend - to go to a bookstore with
a writer. There are some who stay there for hours, leafing through
books they never buy or looking for things they already know aren't
there. One writer friend always bought the latest titles, just to be "up
to date." I doubt he read any of them. Another despised anything
new and headed straight for the Everyman Series or for used book
stores. I know one writer who smells books before buying them and
another who always buys two copies of every book: one to read and
give away and the other to maintain the perfection of his collection.
What books did Vargas Llosa buy? I was astonished at the name he
asked about as soon as we walked in: Azorfn. I told him that the only
Azorin reader I knew was Jose Emilio Pacheco.
MVL:
Which is all toJose Emilio's credit. I read Azorin a lot because
he refines my ear.
If
you don't read well-written things in Span–
ish, you lose the music of the language.
IS:
Which other writers would you read for that purpose?
MVL:
Valle-IncIan. Gabriel Mira is another, I don't like
what
he
says, but I get a great deal of pleasure from the way he says it.
Vargas Llosa also bought two books by Alfonso Reyes. He
perused a new edition in Spanish of
The Man Who Was Thursday
and
sadly recalled the days when everyone would go out looking for the
authors Borges recommended.
MVL:
I can remember searching through every bookstore in town
for the plays by Bernard Shaw that Borges liked most. The same
goes for Chesterton and Kipling.
He stopped at one of Tolstoy's books and told me how impor–
tant Tolstoy was in his own intellectual development. I asked about
Dostoyevsky.
MVL:
Even though I've always thought him a great writer, he has
never meant as much as Tolstoy for me. In fact, I think that this
choice - after all, both are authors we all have to read - is a part–
ing of the ways for a young writer: will he choose the exterior
world or the interior world? Toward which will he direct his gaze?
