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PARTISAN REVIEW
knows exactly what she's going to do, although she sniffs around a
lot, looking for it-but in fact she's just going straight to see a man
who's got tendencies to kill, and he will kill her. In the end she just
goes up to him and says, "You're coming with me," it's nearly mid–
night by that time.
The Driver's Seat
is a book about that sort of
destiny-driven creature: a girl who didn't realize what she was do–
ing, but who was in fact going direct.
SF:
Do you think most people are driven toward violence the way
she is?
MS:
I don't know. Not everyone creates his own end, I don't think.
But violence and suffering are there, lurking everywhere, and of
course death is inevitable-I think life would be insipid without it.
SF:
Do you find yourself attracted to violence, that is in the intellec–
tual sense?
MS:
Yes, I'm quite fascinated by violence. I read policiers, detective
stories, all that sort of thing, and I think a lot of life is violent. A lot
of my novels don't have violence, but sometimes it's necessary: you
can't have novels without violence. For instance, in a lot ofromantic
novels-take Daphne Du Maurier's-there's violence all over the
place. But she weeps a lot over it, it's very romantically presented.
And generally speaking you find more violence in love story
novelists, taking extreme cases. I don't know if you've ever read
Barbara Cartland, but her books are full of violence, men whipping
brides and, oh my God, this is the romantic thing carried to its ab–
surdity. I'm a classicist. But this attitude of stating everything
calmly is very much in the British tradition, you know, Wilkie Col–
lins and so on; it's not invented by me. Traditionally authors have
set their violence in a certain frame: for instance Emily Bronte, a
romantic novelist of great genius, would have a storm raging while
the thing's going on. I just do it in the calm. But it makes no dif–
ference to the fact of it.
SF:
John Updike once said in a review of
The Bachelors
that he
thought your novels lacked a compelling portrait of the good, and
that without that it was difficult to provide a convincing portrait of
evil. Do you think that's true?
MS:
Well I think it depends on what you mean by a portrait of the
good . In that novel there was a young Irishman who was very
devoted to this girl who was going to be killed by another man if he
hadn't happened to have been sent to jail. The Irishman saved her
life, really. I don't know whether John Updike has given us a con-
