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!

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.

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.