It is great not required of the writer in these interviews that he be and wise. We all know, we readers of contemporary literature, that our novelists and poets do not live better than we do. What is required is that the writer be gifted, which ever since the Romantic period has meant vividness, a heightened degree of involvement with himself, a sense of his particular gift or daemon. When we interview a gifted, vivid, intense, highly charged modern writer, we are really saying: What does it feel like to be this gifted? What's it like, day after day, living with a gift like yours? [...]

The fascination of these contemporary interviews, for me, is that each brings vividly before us, as a person seemingly different, gifted with a more instinctive sense of freedom, a writer who can never be sure that his emotions, his habits, his childhood, his loves and enmities, are not crucial to his work. The modern writer is likely to feel that his life and his work speak for each other; when an interviewer gently presses him to tell more, he will gladly try, for in the writer's own mind clarity about a seemingly personal matter seems to advance that moral clarity which is tantamount to literary power. Power, technical and intellectual power, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind, is what writers live for. And since, in modern times, writers feel that this power is in themselves alone, one can see why the gifted writer is enthralled by his own experiences, is gripped by himself in ways that are of technical interest to the rest of us. There is always something professional and impersonal in a writer's concern with his own experience. Even his eloquence about it shows gratitude for what he can make of himself.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. "The world is my representation." Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors.

Interviewer: Do you keep a sort of abstract potential reader or viewer in mind when you work?

Cocteau: You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle. It is fichu.

Cocteau: I will recount one thing; then vou must let me rest. You perhaps know the work of the painter Domergue? The long calendar art, I am afraid. He had a domestique in those days —a "housemaid" who would make the beds, fill the coal scuttles. We all gathered in those days at the Cafe Rotonde. And a little man with a bulging forehead and black goatee would come there girls; sometimes for a glass, and to hear us talk. And to "look at the painters." This was the "housemaid" of Domergue, out of funds. We asked him once (he said nothing and merely listened) what he did. He said he meant to overthrow the government of Russia. We all laughed, because of course we did too. That is the kind of time it was! It was Lenin.

Celine: [...] It was extreme poverty. Tougher than poverty, because in poverty you can let yourself go, degenerate, get drunk, but this was poverty which keeps up, dignified poverty. It was terrible. All my life I ate noodles. Because my mother used to repair old lacework. And one thing about old lace is that odors stick to it forever. And you can't deliver smelly lace! So what didn't smell? Noodles. I've eaten basinfuls My mother made noodles by the basinful. Boiled of noodles. noodles, oh, yes, yes, all my youth, noodles and mush. Stuff that didn't smell. The kitchen in the Passage Choiseul was on the second floor, as big as a cupboard, you got to the second floor by a corkscrew staircase, like this, and you had to go up and down endlessly to see if it was cooking, if it was boiling, if it wasn't boiling, impossible. My mother was a cripple, one of her legs didn't work, and she had to climb that staircase. We used to climb it twenty-five times a day. It was some life. An impossible life. And my father was a clerk. He came home at five. He had to do the deliveries for her. Oh, no, that was poverty, dignified poverty.

Celine: [...] My mother worshiped rich people, you see. So what do you expect, it colored me too. I wasn't quite convinced. No. But I didn't dare have an opinion, no, no. My mother who was in lace up to her neck would never have dreamed of wearing any. That was for the customers. Never. It wasn't done, you see. Not even the jeweler, he didn't wear jewels, the jeweler's wife never wore jewels. [...]

Celine: Oh, she couldn't, it wasn't within her reach. She'd have thought it all coarse, and then she didn't read books, she wasn't the kind of woman who reads. She didn't have any vanity at all. She kept on working till her death. I was in prison. I heard she had died. No, I was just arriving in Copenhagen when I heard of her death. A terrible trip, vile, yes— the perfect orchestration. Abominable. But things are only abominable from one side, don't forget, eh? And, you know ... experience is a dim lamp which only lights the one who bears it ... and incommunicable. . . . . Have to keep that for myself. For me, you only had the right to die when you had a good tale to tell. To enter in, you tell your story and pass on. That's what Death on the Installment Plan is, symbolically, the reward of life being death. Seeing as . . . it's not the good Lord who rules, it's the devil. Man. Nature's disgusting, just look at it, bird life, animal life.

Interviewer: Before you wrote plays, did you write anything else?

Hellman: Yes, short stories, a few poems. A couple of the stories were printed in a long-dead magazine called The Paris Comet for which Arthur Kober worked. Arthur and I were married and living in Paris. Let's see, about 1928, 1929, somewhere in there. They I reread them a few years ago. The were very lady-writer stories. The kind of stories where the man puts his fork down and the woman knows it's all over. You know.

Interviewer: How much are you conscious of the reader when you write? Is there an ideal audience that you write for?

Bellow: I have in mind another human being who will understand me. I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding, which is Jewish. And on a meeting of sympathies, which is human. But I have no ideal reader in my head, no. Let me just say this, too. I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.