Forty years is a long perspective, but perhaps it can afford a clear view. I look back at Clifford Odets—no one I’ve known was more talented. He couldn’t resist the money, the flattery, the apparent safety and security in the movie community. And he lost himself. Harold Clurman, one of the men I’ve most admired, was lucky: The people who ran the big studios did not want him, and he had to come east again; that saved him, for he seemed lost in southern California. But I’m not praising the East over the West. New York was simply my habitat, where my sources were. In Hollywood I’d have had to rely on my cleverness and my facility, which are technical, not artistic, qualities. The one time I met William Faulkner, I remember he wore rubber boots and they were covered with the mud of his Mississippi winter. He never left his home in Oxford for very long. John Steinbeck left northern California and looked a fool in New York theatre society and on the right bank of Paris. Saul Bellow is wise; he stays in Chicago. As for Nick Ray, who knew more about the back roads and so on, I saw him give himself over and be lost among the moguls of the film world. And Orson Welles, the most talented and inventive theatre man of my day: What an ass he seemed in the posh restaurants and hotels of Europe’s capitals, and how sad later, in financial desperation, making TV commercials. I was to watch with an awful pain how lost Tennessee Williams was as he shuttled around the bright spots of the world. The money his great success brought him allowed him to live in a way that squashed his talent. He would have been better off living in his native South, that part of the world where he was uncomfortable, even outraged, because he felt he was an outsider. Notice Picasso, how he stayed where his clay was, and Matisse and Renoir and Cézanne. It’s difficult to get Fellini out of Italy for any reason, or Bergman out of Sweden or Satyajit Ray out of Bengal. They know where their artistic roots are. I was with Kurosawa in New York City and he seemed like a child eager to return home—which he soon did. Read the letters of Gustave Flaubert and notice how rarely he made the trip—an hour? two?—to Paris, where his mistress was eagerly waiting to see him. He knew his material was in the province of Normandy. And Proust: He lived in what he wrote about—a life no one else could tolerate.