Incidentally, speaking of my first nymphet, let me take this neat opportunity to correct a curious misconception profferred by an anonymous owl in a London weekly a couple of months ago. Most of the writers I have met were Russian emigres in the nineteen twenties and thirties. With American novelists I have had virtually no contact. In England, I had lunch once with Graham Greene. I have dined with Joyce and have had tea with Robbe-Grillet.
Isolation means liberty and discovery.
A desert island may be more exciting than a city, but my loneliness, on the whole, has little significance. As a private person I am good-natured, warm, cheerful, straightforward, plainspoken, and intolerant of bogus art. I do not mind my own writings being criticized or ignored and therefore think it funny that people not even concerned with literature should be upset by my finding D. H. Lawrence execrable or my seeing in H. G. Wells a far greater artist than Conrad. Rowdies are never revolutionary, they are always reac' tionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests.