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PARTISAN REVIEW
people." I think that on the whole Auden felt that's true of most
critics.
PM:
You wrote criticism ofIsherwood's book, which you didn't like,
and he was hurt and angered by that.
SS:
I'm not quite sure that I agree with him about his belief, and I'm
not even sure how far he agrees with himself. However, he believes
that if you are personal friends with people, you should write only
favorably about their work.
If
a friend writes a book that you don't
like, you just shouldn't write about it. I don't absolutely agree,
because it may be important to do so. One can think of controversies
in the history of the arts in which an attack made by someone who
was a personal friend of someone else has played a very important
role. For instance, Nietzsche's attack on Wagner is marvelous and
interesting, because Nietzsche was such a friend of Wagner at one
time and so admired his work.
I'm not sure whether I agree with Isherwood, but I think that if
there was serious reason to attack someone with whom one had a
personal friendship one might want to do so. For instance, one
might have attacked the whole cult of sensibility which we were talk–
ing about in Virginia Woolf. One might want to analyze it in the
work of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and others in Bloomsbury
and stage an attack on it, in spite of the fact that one had been so
friendly with the people concerned.
PM:
She really attacked you and MacNeice and Auden in "Letter to
a Young Poet."
SS:
That's right. She did, but we didn't have any resentment toward
her for her having done it.
PM:
You took it as a wish to be helpful, to offer "constructive
criticism"?
SS:
No, I don't think it was. She was fond of me, but I don't think she
knew the others. No, I think that when she was alone in her study
writing she said things she would not have even felt if one had been
in the same room. We were absolutely unharmed by this attack,
because from our point of view all that essay showed was that Vir–
ginia Woolf, great genius as she was and perceptive critic as she was,
really knew nothing about modern poetry. It was the kind of attack
that didn't hurt at all.
PM:
But it sounds as if you are very much helped by what your
friends say of your work in progress. Just as at Oxford, your group
read each other's work and were critical, even so now. You write for
a few people and care intensely about what they say.
