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PARTISAN REVIEW
mentions at one point how her imagination is more aural than
visual-something that Evelyn Waugh also said. Do you feel that
way?
MS:
Oh yes, absolutely.
SF:
Is that something that British writers tend to feel more than
Americans?
MS:
No, I think it's more true of poets . All poets hear inner
voices-words, sentences-rather than seeing visualized scenes .
Dramatists visualize scenes . Henry James visualized everything he
saw: everything was scenic.
SF:
Quite a few reviewers have seen your novels as cold and overly
intellectual . Do you think that's a valid criticism?
MS:
I think my work is detached , yes. I don't go in for emotional
things much. By intention . But I don't mind writers writing about
emotions as long as they're precise about them. What I don't like is
mush. To say that a character screams three times doesn ' t tell you
anything
about a character.
SF:
What about the criticism that there are no portraits of successful
emotional relationships in your novels, except perhaps in
The
Mandelbaum Gate?
MS:
Even in
The Mandelbaum Gate
I don't see that there's any suc–
cessful relationship-or if there is, it's peripheral, really, to the
story. No, I don't
deal
with men and women and love. It's not that I
see it as irrelevant-although sometimes it
is
irrelevant-but I don 't
see that the relationship between men and women is very good these
days. And in any case it's not my subject. Emotional attachments
between men and women would be the thing that appealed to me if I
were writing about them, and I do bring it in , I take it as a matter of
course that people, men and women, are attracted to each other. It's
just not what I'm writing
about .
But in some of my novels I have
husbands and wives who are perfectly all right. And anyway, there
are no "happy" situations-everything is mixed. Nobody is happy
for three months on end, it's the human condition . It ' s not possible .
SF:
In your play
Doctors of Philosophy
all the male characters are
named Charlie ; is that meant to suggest that you see all men as
equally superfluous?
MS:
That was really a point of stylization, because it was a women's
play: it was about women and their problems, whether they go to the
university and become scholars or whether they give it up for mar–
riage and children. But I didn't mean to make a philosophical state-
