STEPHEN SPENDER
47
upper-class code. Not feeling myself very English anyway , I always
felt happier abroad than in England. During the war , as a matter
of fact , if one was in England, one recovered a great feeling of Eng–
land. I can think of Englishness as something almost sacred , but
I always feel a bit of an outsider and not really English myself;
therefore, wherever I am , I feel pretty well at home. If I go to Asia,
for instance, I don't feel that I have a white face in contrast to these
peoples of different colors ; I really feel as if I'm almost one of them.
I've never found it very difficult to bridge those gulfs, which are sup–
posed to exist. I've always felt myself rather international , I think.
PM:
You've been extraordinarily prolific - you've written seventy–
five books - yet you describe yourself as being very social, finding it
difficult to say "no" to invitations. What exactly is your work routine?
How do you manage to write so much?
SS:
If
one has lived a fairly long time , there have been a great many
days in one's life . I've probably written on the average an hour or
two a day, every day of my life , and if you worked it out , one could
have written seventy-five books , I think . On the whole, when I am
working on something that I care about, I really am working at it, or
thinking about it, the whole time. A friend of mine always says, "I
think of you as having a certain expression on your face when you're
pretending to listen to me." When I'm pretending to listen to people,
I'm usually getting on with whatever I happen to be writing.
SR:
You've written and spoken about what you term the need for
"pressure" in writing, which I understand to mean the tension be–
tween the content and the form . Do you perceive a difference in your
own approach to fiction (which you've not written for some time)
versus poetry or journalism? How do you handle these diverse forms
of "pressure"?
SS:
Journalism I do simply to make money, although one needn't
necessarily . It could be like writing a letter, for instance, which I do .
In fact, I really prefer writing things I'm not paid for, and what I like
very much is writing letters to people. Writing for one person seems
to me the ideal situation.
Actually I think one has to keep on more or less writing in a
genre like fiction, and if one doesn't , one forgets how to write in that
genre. I would like to write stories, but I have the feeling that fiction
has developed a great deal since the time when I did write stories ,
and I don't really know how to start again . I have kept on writing
poetry just about enough to feel that I don't have to ask myself,
"How does one write a poem?"
PM:
You've also written a play, about Germany in the thirties. Did
