SARA FRANKEL
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vincing portrait of the good, mind you; his characters are just in and
out of bed all the time.
SF:
Have you used much of your own experience in your novels ,
aside from the obvious ones like
The Prime
of
Miss Jean Brodie?
MS:
I tend to take chunks of my life , but I never do it absolutely
photographically. I tend to take a chunk and do that
area.
Sometimes
I transpose it in time, and fill in about living in this place, or in that
boarding house, like in
The Girls oj Slender Means,
that sort of thing.
Once I wrote a novel from a dream , entirely. That was
The Public
Image.
I had been in Rome, and then I was back in New York , and I
was going to move to Rome-I dreamt the whole thing in New
York, and when I arrived in Rome I wrote the book.
It
was the
easiest book I ever wrote .
SF:
You once said in an interview with Frank Kermode that " things
just happen, and then one records what has happened ." Isn't that a
slightly disingenuous account of what takes place in the writing pro–
cess?
MS:
Well, I gave that interview a long time ago . Things
do
happen ,
and one records what has happened, but what I meant was a mental
event of one's own . It's not journalistic; it's not like being an
observer or a passive medium for recording events. But one is a
magnet when one is writing books: obviously one's mind concen–
trates very hard in a certain field, and one's unconscious mind is
probably working on it, and it appears that things happen that
wouldn't normally happen . One is a magnet for the experience one
needs . I don't think that one
is ,
but it
appears
to be so, I suppose
because one notices things which one would otherwise ignore.
SF:
Where do you live mostly now?
MS:
In Tuscany , at the moment , because Penelope* has a big house
there , and I can have the whole top floor. It's a charming place,
really, about 200 kilometers from Rome, two and a half hours . In
Rome I have my flat, but I work mostly in Tuscany, in a big room
with a wooden table on two trestles. I like a big long table, so I can
put dictionaries on it, a sandwich, a cat. . . .
SF:
You once said , in your essay "The Poet's House," that you 'd
never met a really good writer who lived in high style. Do you still
feel that way?
'Penelope J ardine, the English sculptor who had accompanied Mrs. Spark to Paris .
