‘Well it so happens that you of all people know almost exactly what it’s like – to be a writer. You’re in your early-middle teens. The age when you come into a new level of self-awareness. Or a new level of self-communion. It’s as if you hear a voice, which is you but doesn’t sound like you. Not quite – it isn’t what you’ve been used to, it sounds more articulate and discerning, more thoughtful and also more playful, more critical (and self-critical) and also more generous and forgiving. You like this advanced voice, and to maintain it you find yourself writing poems, you keep a diary perhaps, you start to fill a notebook. In welcome solitude you moon over your thoughts and feelings, and sometimes you moon over the thoughts and feelings of others. In solitude.

‘That’s the writer’s life. The aspiration starts now, at around fifteen, and if you become a writer your life never really changes. I’m still doing it half a century later, all day long. Writers are stalled adolescents, but contentedly stalled; they enjoy their house arrest…To you the world seems strange: the adult world that you’re now contemplating, with inevitable anxiety but still from a fairly safe distance. Like the stories Othello tells Desdemona, the stories that won her heart, the adult world seems “strange, passing strange”; it also seems “pitiful, wondrous pitiful”. A writer never moves on from that premise. Don’t forget that the adolescent is still a child; and a child sees things without presuppositions, and unreassured by experience.’

And coming closer with ridiculous haste. In fact you start to feel a bit of a dupe every time you open your eyes and get out of bed. The psychic clock (people have written about this) definitely accelerates…After I turned sixty my birthdays became biannual, then triannual. The Atlantic Monthly gradually became a fortnightly; and now it’s the Atlantic Weekly. Just lately, I shave, or feel as though I shave, every day (and I provably don’t shave every day). In the New York Times the op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman used to appear on Wednesdays only, but now he writes a piece every twenty-four hours (following the example of Gail Collins and Paul Krugman); and when it’s bad, I seem to be settling down to these authors, over a leisurely breakfast (fruit, cereal, softboiled egg), every forty-five minutes.

There naturally followed a discussion about drunkenness and drunkards (with Saul describing the two drunkards he’d known best, the poets Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman). Saul had not yet come up with one of the great observations on drunkenness and drunkards (it appears in the late story ‘Something to Remember Me By’): There was a convention about drunkenness, established in part by drunkards. The founding proposition was that consciousness is terrible.*7 And then there was the mysterious American tilt to the nexus between writers and suicide…

What’s the difference between a story and a plot? you ask.

According to E. M. Forster (whom Jane used to refer to by his middle name, as did everyone who knew him), ‘the king died and then the queen died’ is a story, but ‘the king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. Not so, Edward, not so, Morgan! ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is still a story. To mutate into a plot, a story needs a further element – easily supplied, here, by a comma and an adverb.

The king died, and then the queen died, ostensibly of grief is a plot. Or a hook. Plots demand constant attention, but a good hook can stand alone and untouched, like an anchor, and keep things fixed and stable in any weather. Plots and hooks yield the same desideratum: they set the reader a question, with the implicit assurance that the question will be answered.

Serious fiction could respond to the accelerated world; but serious poetry couldn’t. Naturally it couldn’t. A poem, a non-narrative poem, a lyric poem – the first thing it does is stop the clock. It stops the clock while whispering, Let us go then, you and I, let us go and examine an epiphany, a pregnant moment, and afterwards we’ll have a think about that epiphany, and we’ll…But the speeded-up world doesn’t have time for stopped clocks.

Meanwhile the novelists subliminally realised that in their pages the arrow of development, purpose, furtherance, had to be sharpened. And they sharpened it. This wasn’t and isn’t a fad or a fashion (far less a bandwagon). Novelists aren’t mere observers of the speeded-up world; they inhabit it and feel its rhythms and breathe its air. So they adapted; they evolved.

It’s a matter of pressing interest, I find. What is the purpose of my average day?

If you’d asked me that five years ago, I would’ve equably cited John Dryden, who said that the purpose of literature is to give ‘instruction and delight’. That verdict goes back three centuries, and in my opinion has worn pretty well.*

You hope to delight, and also to instruct. Instruct in a way that you hope will stimulate the reader’s mind, heart, and, yes, soul, and make the reader’s world fuller and richer. My ambition is summed up by a minor character in the late-period Bellow novel The Dean’s December: a stray dog, on the streets of Bucharest, whose compulsive barks seem to represent ‘a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God’s sake, open the universe a little more!)’.

‘It’s nothing bad. It’s good…Very early on this year I had a kind of…I wasn’t at my desk. I was reading on the sofa. I closed my eyes and imagined a visitor had come to the house. Entirely benign. A gentle ghost – a gentle reader, in fact. And guess who it was. My much younger self, come to me with questions. Only I felt more like a girl this time round. It was like receiving a child of mine. Kind of Nat plus Bobbie.’

‘Jesus Christ. Were you having one of your episodes d’you think?’

‘Probably. Anyway, then I wrote ten pages – fast. Something became undammed. It was me at eighteen, when I used to say to myself, I don’t want to be a writer (or not yet). I want to be a reader. I just want to be a part of it. Humbly resolved, Elena. Devotional. I just wanted to be a part of it.’

‘…Okay. Bye now. D’you realise how early we’ve got to get up? In about half an hour!’ She yawned. ‘Well if you do go crazy, I’ll stand by you. Up to a point.’

‘I know you will, my dearest. Up to a point.’

Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word),

That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I’d be a part of it.

‘Okay. Carlton had your dress hoicked up over your ribcage!’

With quiet matter-of-factness, taking rightful warmth from her cup with both palms, Phoebe said, ‘He wanted to see it. So I showed him.’

‘Yes, completely straightforward. And logical. Carlton wanted to see it, so you hoicked up your dress and showed Carlton your…?’

‘My mandala. Luckily these pants are see-through so I didn’t have to take them down. I’ll explain,’ she said. ‘Now Carlton’s a corporate raider, but you have to understand that he finds himself drawn, he finds himself increasingly drawn, Martin, to Buddha.’

He had no reason to invoke that very congenial episode, up north. But he kept thinking of it while they ate. After the public event, the dinner, and the nightcaps in the hotel lounge, they went to her room and followed the dictates of muscle memory. Being faithful won’t do a damn thing for me (he’d briefly reasoned): I’ll be punished anyway…

Jed Slot was in the hotel bar – being interviewed. Himself a teetotaller, Jed did all his interviews in the hotel bar, and I’d arranged to do all my interviews in there too; but whereas Slot’s sessions lasted all day long and well into the night, mine only accounted for teatime (so I often went in early and came out late, just to listen). The truth was that I had taken up Jed like a new hobby. I had even read him.

‘Eh bien. Now tell me, if you would,’ began the questioner (a shrivelled sage with a briar pipe), ‘what is the difference between the novel and the short story – I mean compositionally, in terms of praxis?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Jed, ‘the novel is more expansive. By contrast, the short story is more succinct.’