EDEL: I believe the secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip. The difference between one kind of biographer and another may be measured by the quantity of poetry infused into the narrative of life and doing—the poetry of existence, of trial and error, initiation and discovery, rites of passage and development, the inevitabilities of aging, or the truncatedlives, Keats, Byron and others, who died young and yet somehow burned like bright flames. This kind of writing requires patience, assiduity, also enthusiasm, feeling, and certainly a sense of the biographer’s participation. The biographer is a presence in life-writing, in charge of handling the material, establishing order, explaining and analyzing the ambiguities and anomalies. Biography is dull if it’s just dates and facts: it has for too long ignored the entire province of psychology and the emotions. Ultimately, there must be a sense of the inwardness of human beings as well as outwardness: the ways in which we make dreams into realities,the way fantasies become plays and novels and poems—or the general who fights a great battle, Nelson and Trafalgar, Wellington and Waterloo, Washington and Valley Forge, the defeated Napoleon and his Waterloo—the strivings and the failings. It involves finding the links between the body and the spirit or soul in which human beings seem to rise above weakness and struggle.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever feel like arguing with James?

EDEL: Not often. I did like his balanced view of life, his calm, his general “cool” compared to my own impulsive way of approaching life. But I think I can best answer your question by telling you the one dream I had about him.I never dreamed about him when I was working on the biography. But when I had finished, I one day dreamed I was a journalist again and with a group of journalists at Lamb House, his country house in Sussex. | remember that in the dream I was worried what he might think about all I had written about him. I hung back, and when the rest of the press went away I walked into his study. He was sitting behind his desk. I sat down and said,“Mr. James, I must tell you, I’ve had great difficulties establishing the hierarchies of your friendships.” He looked sadly at me and replied, “You know, I never got them sorted out myself.’ ]think what I did in that dream was to give myself James’s blessing. The dream also enunciated a biographical truth. The subject of a biography has never had a chance to bring order to a life so constantly lived and involved in action. It is the biographer who finds the frame,sorts things out, and for better or worse tries to bring order into life story—create a sense of sequence and coherence.

INTERVIEWER: You've often said that you think poetry should be ‘‘chiefly hair-raising.” At the same time, however, you’ve spoken of the desirability of a strong bond between the poet and the community he lives in—a bond that you seem to believe has been broken in modern times. Do you see any contradiction or tension between such social concern and the requirement that poetry be, above all, hair-raising?

FITZGERALD: Well, don’t we have Emily Dickinson, the wondrous lady of Amherst, as an authority for that: ‘It’s a poem if it makes you feel as though your head were taken off’? And A. E.. Houseman: ‘If while I am shaving a line of poetry strays into my mind, my beard bristles so that I can’t cut it’? This is an extreme, and this kind of poetry is part of the extreme literary experience—extreme both for the maker and for the reader. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other end there is Dryden, sitting in his coffeehouse, turning out couplets to insult someone whom he feels like insulting. So, one has the gamut between what is essentially a private, we might say a metaphysical experience, and the other which is simply a refinement of prose—verse devoted to wit, or to the quotidian purpose of making something clear or making somebody ashamed, of exposing somebody, of putting into a witty form someone’s foibles . . . which can be read with amusement and without a touch of the other extreme, which is private and rare and precious. I don’t see why we can’t live with a decent consciousness of these two poles of poetic experience. I once said, too, that poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. That says it pretty well—“‘is at least an elegance’— something that is well-formed, readable, and then again something that takes you up.

[...] I’ve thought quite a lot about the issue of fiction and journalism as two possible ways of presenting realities of life, particularly such harsh ones as we’ve encountered in my lifetime. Fiction is the more attractive to me, because if a novelist succeeds, he can enable the reader to identify with the characters of the story, to become the characters of the story, almost, in reading. Whereas in journalism, the writer is always mediating between the material and the reader; the reader is conscious of the journalist presenting material to him. This was one of the reasons why I had experimented with the devices of fiction in doing journalism, in the hopes that my mediation would, ideally, disappear. I believe that the reader is not conscious of the writer of fiction, except through the author’s voice—that is, you are conscious of the person behind the work. But in journalism you are conscious of the person in the work, the person who’s writing it and explaining to you what’s taken place. So my hope was, by using the tricks and the ways of fiction, to be able to eliminate that mediation and have the reader directly confronted by the characters. In this case, my hope was that the reader would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain, some of the disaster, and therefore realize it.

[...] That, in fact, was one reason Ezra became interested in Mussolini. He knew that Mussolini was an intelligent, rather cultivated man. He’d been a Socialist journalist. Ezra hoped that Mussolini would throttle the banks and could be converted into a patron of arts and letters. You remember the Renaissance princes, such as Sigismondo Malatesta. Ezra admired Sigismondo not because he went out and beat up other princes’ hired armies, but because he brought the best Greek scholars, such as Gemistus Plethon, and Italian artists such as Alberti and Duccio di Buoninsegna and Piero della Francesca, to his court and he built the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini for his girlfriend Isotta.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the feeling of first publication?

ozick: I was thirty-seven years old. I had the baby and the galleys together, and I sat at my desk—the same desk I use now, the same desk I inherited from my brother when I was eight years old—correcting the galleys with my right hand, and rocking the baby carriage with my left. I felt stung when the review in Time, which had a big feature on first novels that season, got my age wrong and added a year. I hated being so old; beginning when I thought I’d be so far along. I’ve had age-sorrow all my life. I had it on publication, but for the next ten years or so the child was so distracting that I hardly noticed what publication “felt’’ like.

INTERVIEWER: Whatsustained you without publication during that period?

OZICK: Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature. I had a youthful arrogance about my“powers,” and at the same time a terrible feeling of humiliation, of total shame and defeat. When I think about that time—and I’ve spent each decade as it comes regretting the decade before, it seems—l wish I had done what I see the current generation doing: I wish I had scurried around for reviews to do, for articles to write. I wish I had written short stories. I wish I had not been sunk in an immense dream of immense achievement. For most of this time, I was living at home in my parents’ house, already married. But my outer life was unchanged from childhood. And my inner life was also unchanged. I was fixed, transfixed. It was Literature every breathing moment. I had no “ordinary” life. I despised ordinary life; I had contempt for it. What a meshuggas!

ozick: [Resumes typing] The Modernist Dream. I recently did a review of William Gaddis and talked about his ambition—his coming on the scene whenit was alreadytoo late to be ambitious in that huge way with a vast modernist novel. But I was ambitious that way too. I no longer believe in Literature, capital-L, with the samefervor I used to. I’ve learned to respect living, perhaps. I think I have gotten over my fear of largeness as well, because I have gotten over my awe—my idolatrous awe. Literature is not all there is in the world, I now recognize. It is, | admit, still my All, but it isn’t the All. And that is a difference I can finally see.

OZICK: Quentin Bell’s biography told the story of his aunt, who happened to be the famous writer Virginia Woolf. But it was a family story really, about a woman with psychotic episodes, her husband’s coping with this, her sister’s distress. It had, as I said, the smell of a household. It was not about the sentences in Virginia Woolf’s books. The Wharton biography, though more a “literary” biography, dealt with status, not with the writer’s private heart. What do I mean by“private heart’? It’s probably impossible to define, but it’s not what the writer does—breakfast, schedule, social outings—but what the writer is. The secret contemplative self. An inner recess wherein insights occur. This writer’s self is perhaps coextensive with one of the writer’s sentences. It seems to me that more can be found abouta writer in any single sentencein a workoffiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!

ozick: Ah! When I’ve taught those classes, I always say, “Forget about “Write about what you know.’ Write about what you don’t know.” The point is that the self is limiting. The self—subjectivity—is narrow and bound to be repetitive. We are,after all, a species. When you write about what you don’t know, this means you begin to think about the world at large. You begin to think beyond the home-thoughts. You enter dream and imagination.