46
PARTISAN REVIEW
always was to be independent - and to have a typewriter and a room
of my own - and to start doing my own work .
I joined forces with Christopher Isherwood , who was living in
Berlin and was rather lonely there - he wanted someone to talk to
about literature and things. We lived very close to each other, and
we met for every meal. That really was my life then - seeing Chris–
topher Isherwood and getting on with my writing.
PM:
Had your relationship with Isherwood remained the same as it
had been when you were an undergraduate?
SS:
Yes, I think my relationships with nearly all my friends have
stayed the same . We're very fond of one another, and we meet
whenever we can.
SR:
There is a popular image of the poet as always a youthful figure
and yet, in fact, you are writing poetry well into old age, just as
Frost and Eliot and Stevens did.
SS:
In a way it's a phenomenon of living in the twentieth century.
Poets tend to get terribly preoccupied in middle life. In early life one
is neglected and , therefore, free from being called on the whole time ,
so one can get on with one's work . Then in old age one is also sud–
denly free again , and things are falling away from one . One in–
teresting thing about being old is that one is invisible: if I get into an
elevator, say, and it's full of young people , they don't look at me ;
they're looking at one another . That sense of being invisible is rather
mce .
PM:
Has your view of yourself changed? In
World Within World,
the
sense I had of you as an undergraduate was somebody very sensitive
and shy, easily humiliated. Someone made the remark to you that
artists thrive on humiliation .
SS:
Yes , Auden said , "You will always be a poet because you will
always be humiliated ." I'm rather beyond being humiliated . But
otherwise I think I am very much as I was .
SR:
You talk about not changing, but I wonder if your time in
America has had any direct impact on your writing.
SS:
I never felt very "English" as a writer. In fact, in my generation,
to be young and a member of the English upper-middle class , the
kind of person who goes to an English public school and to Oxford or
Cambridge, meant that if you were not English - and by origin I am
a quarter-German and a quarter-jewish-one was made very con–
scious of being a bit of an outsider. Also I belonged to a time when
people of my generation resented England very much - the public
school system, the Conservative Party, all the governments of Eng–
land between the two wars, the British Empire, the whole English
