Very much so. My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. My early stories represent already an attempt to think about my central question. I think The Portage of San Cristobel of AH is more than that. That book may have a certain life. Proofs is another parable, an intellectual parable; but the speeches in AH, the parts of the novel that have really perhaps moved people, are also essays. I know that. They are statements of doctrine, of belief, of conviction, of questioning. The mystery whereby a creative artist somehow—we don't have an answer—generates a voice, a three-dimensional, ten-dimensional character who takes on independent life, has very little to do with pure intelligence or systematic, analytic powers. There are immensely intelligent novelists, God knows, and maybe Proust's was the most powerful mind of the century in some ways, cerebrally; but many are not that way at all. They can give no account of the spontaneous coming together within themselves and language of that genesis of the living, of that thing which walks in front of you so you forget the name of the author. That is genius, that is creativity, and I certainly don't have it. Two pages of Chekhov create for you a whole world and you never forget the voices. There they are. That is something very different, I think, from what somebody like myself can do.