I think that I should explain the phrase--
my saying that I have world enough and time.
True, my book has been the center
of a furor of blast and praise, and, in the cases of blast,
my publisher has ascertained that no one who blasted
read the book at all.
In fact, they didn't even read the book jacket very well.
I was astonished at this blast since the book was
written with a total disregard of the negative side
of American culture, and with a great belief
in American culture, particularly
as I am university-oriented and not Madison Avenue-oriented.
I met an eminent psychiatrist at a party
for Up the Down Staircase.
Val Kaufman is a dear friend of mine
and she invited me to dinner because she
was one of my readers.
She's one of the great authorities
on suicide in this world--
really a great authority on suicide.
So I thought perhaps she could explain the blast to me.
I said, why are they blasting, especially when
they haven't read.
She said, well, my dear, you confront them with this fact.
You have world enough and time, and they
have been sitting around for years with their goofballs
and their alcohol and their nervous breakdowns
saying that no one in American society
can take the time to write a novel of this length
and seriousness--
that it's too late, that the world does not permit it.
All the while, I was just peacefully writing it.
I used to hear radio programs during the writing in which I
would hear seminars of critics sitting around moaning
the fact that no one could take the time
to write a novel, which is, after all, only half
the length of Proust in our time.
And I would laugh like the cat that
swallowed several canaries.
They're still appalled.
I think the nicest thing of all which was said
was when I was introduced by a Jesuit
at Fordham, who said it will take
the literary world several years to absorb the shock of Miss
McIntosh, My Darling.
I don't know why it should be a shock that an American would
take as long as Joyce or not as long
as Proust to write a novel.
Why they will accept this from a European with some equanimity
but are appalled if an American has that kind of dedication.
I feel that the serious and fabulous side of life
are eminently American--
that we are the great dreamers, that we are the great believers
in the literary art, that our literature in every century
has been in its major statements the literature
of high seriousness, dealing with illusion and the way
it impinges upon reality.
I can cite Hawthorne and Poe and Melville and many others.
I was just explaining to some of the professors
here that I unfortunately had an education
the University of Chicago.
I was an Elizabethan, Jacobian major, so that to me,
poetic prose is as natural as the air I breathe.
In very early years I wanted to be a novelist--
a short story writer.
Then when I was a freshman at Indiana University
I awakened one morning with the conviction
that I would be a poet.
I sometimes regret that decision since it kept me
for 10 years in the field of poetry as a lyric art.
I know this was a great discipline and preparation
for a prose but I sometimes wish that I
had gone straight into fiction.
But I came to the novel by route a long road,
through poetry and through non-fiction,
finally to that which I love the most of all forms--
the novel as a as an extended poem,
almost as an extended metaphor.
Certainly Moby Dick is the novel as poem,
and Joyce is, and I think all the great novels are poems,
whether lyric or epic.