Interviews with writers are now accepted as a discrete literary form, like rondeaus and villanelles, probably for the same reason people read the biographies of writers whose work they have never read. I suppose the Paris Review encouraged the trend starting in the Fifties by publishing an interview in each issue – T.S. Eliot! Evelyn Waugh! – and lending them further respectability by periodically collecting them between hard covers. The point of an interview is to encourage an impression of intimacy with people we are unlikely ever to meet, though most writers in my  experience are not memorably articulate speakers. I’m not being a snob. If I admire and enjoy a writer, I will seek out and usually read his or her interview, just as I read the biographies of cherished writers. I have no problem with the higher gossip, so long as I don’t take it too seriously.  A reader recently sent me an interview with an American novelist he likes whose name I had never heard before. That’s not unusual because I don’t read much contemporary fiction. To put it bluntly, this guy came off as a Barnum-esque self-promoter, with a few safe political platitudes and slogans thrown in for the hell of it. There was no literary talk, no mention of favorite books or writers, no discussion of technique or language. He was there strictly to sell books.   On this date, June 5, in 1962, Vladimir Nabokov and his wife disembarked from the Queen Elizabeth in New York City. He was in town to attend the premiere of Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of his novel. He met with several journalists in his room at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Nabokov was famous for demanding questions from interviewers in advance, and for preparing his responses in writing. The first question in the edited transcript: “Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating person. Why is that so?” Nabokov, who had recently published Pale Fire, replies:   “I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.”   I take Nabokov’s answer as an effective subversion of the interview form and, in general, the celebrity-making industry. Next question: “Still there must be things that move you -- likes and dislikes.” The response:   “My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”   I suspect that post-Lolita, Nabokov had little interest in or need for marketing. By then he was a wealthy writer having a good time. I’ve read all his published interviews and he seems to be consistently enjoying himself. He had an ego, of course. But that was muted with humor and leg-pulling. In an essay titled “Going Public” (Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975) the American poet L.E. Sissman compares a writer to a baseball pitcher or concert pianist:   “He must practice; he must work hard; he must sacrifice mere pleasure to the demands of art; he must be, in a sense, both single-minded and monastic. Unless he is a polymath of the most formidable proportions, he cannot afford or support a second career as a public figure.”   Sissman adds:   “In a word, the serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim. A vow of silence, except through his work. A vow of consistency, sticking with writing to the exclusion of other fields. A vow of ego-chastity, abstaining from adulation. A vow of solitude, or at least long periods of privacy. A vow of self-regard, placing the self as writer before the self as personality.”

I no longer write in books, a decision I made decades ago that I occasionally regret. It came to feel like defacement. But it’s interesting to see what attracted, delighted or puzzled my younger self. Here are the three books on my shelves most heavily underlined and glossed:  Ulysses, the Random House edition I bought in 1967 and read for the first time that year. With each subsequent reading, I added so many glosses I had to tape notepaper among the pages for annotations. The margins were full. On the title page I find such invaluable information as the etymology of Odysseus, the definition of parallax (with diagram), an explanation of the punningly named Ormond Hotel in “Sirens,” and this sentence fragment: “the madnesses [sic] of Deasy, Lyons, Breen, Farrell.” I probably wrote this in 1972, and I don’t remember writing it.   Pascal’s Pensées, the Penguin paperback from 1961, translated by J.M. Cohen. I  already had a taste for aphoristic prose, which is reflected in the passages underlined. I must have been reading the existentialists at the time. A disturbing number of references to Sartre.   Dr. Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, another Penguin. Mostly underlinings rather than notes. I seem to have been especially impressed by Imlac.   All three volumes are officially unreadable. Ulysses has a broken spine and binding. Pascal and Johnson are in two pieces held together with rubber bands. My attachment to them is sentimental. In Johnson’s Dictionary I discovered an appropriate verb, “to postil”: “To gloss; to illustrate with marginal notes.”

Often, I hardly recognize my younger self. I did foolish things I would never contemplate today. My self-centeredness was appalling, my taste frequently shameful, even in books. I read critics uncritically and was cowed by their fame and influence. Taste doesn’t arrive congenitally. You have to work at it and learn to know yourself, capacities rare among the young. Dr. Johnson understood: “Of many writers who filled their age with wonder, and whose names we find celebrated in the books of their contemporaries, the works are now no longer to be seen, or are seen only amidst the lumber of libraries which are seldom visited, where they lie only to show the deceitfulness of hope, and the uncertainty of honour.”   As a teenager and beyond I read too many contemporary writers, so my larger literary education suffered. I often mistook fashion for brilliance. Admittedly, some of our best writers were at work back then – Nabokov, Auden, Singer – and I dutifully read them as they published new work, but my lack of taste was best exemplified by my devotion to Norman Mailer. His egotism was as dense and unpalatable as last year’s fruitcake. To read him today is to confront a writer whose pretentiousness makes him almost literally impossible to read. Usually, that description is a metaphor, a measured dose of satirical exaggeration. Try reading him today, with a post-adolescent’s sensibility.   Consider Mailer’s 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?, written in a hipster’s pidgin English borrowed from William Burroughs, another crime against literature. I remember taking the novel with me on a family camping trip shortly after its publication and convincing myself that I enjoyed it. I was a bookish poseur, dim and dishonest enough to blatantly lie to myself with a straight face. My behavior was not atypical. Much of the literary world – writers, readers, critics -- remains an elaborate masquerade, people signaling their hipness and sophistication by endorsing an approved brand. I still encounter the occasional advocacy of Mailer’s work, including a critic who not long ago launched a defense of his Apollo 11 book, Of a Fire on the Moon (1970). Johnson on Mailer and others:   “Of the decline of reputation many causes may be assigned. It is commonly lost because it never was deserved; and was conferred at first, not by the suffrage of criticism, but by the fondness of friendship, or servility of flattery. The great and popular are very freely applauded; but all soon grow weary of echoing to each other a name which has no other claim to notice, but that many mouths are pronouncing it at once.”       [The passages from Johnson are taken from The Idler essay published June 2, 1759.]

R.L. Barth, our finest living epigrammist (admittedly, not a vast job description), has sent me his translation of a well-known epigram by Martial, the Roman master of the pithy form. Bob found it among his papers and doesn’t remember making it. “[T]ranslating something [Ben] Jonson had translated?” he writes in an email. “Not to mention other famous names? I must have had a touch of hubris. (I think the first one I ever read was [Henry Howard, Earl of] Surrey's, back when I was an undergraduate.)” Here is Bob’s version of X.47 by Marcus Valerius Martialis:  “The things which make a life of ease, Martial, my dearest friend, are these: The patrimony’s easy yield; A thriving fire and fertile field; Neither the courts nor formal dress; Good health; a wise judiciousness; Some friends whose conversation’s able To dignify your simple table; A wife with neither forwardness Nor prudery; deep sleep to press Over the shadows in swift flight; Ability to see you’re right When you’re content; and, with head clear, Face death without desire or fear.”   The epigram is addressed to the poet’s friend, Julius Martialis. It reminds me of the “gratitude list” an old friend urged me years ago to draw up periodically, an exercise to reduce one’s fondness for whining. I’ve experienced many of the things in Martial’s catalog of gifts, at least briefly. That’s remarkable considering he wrote two-thousand years ago. I have no “fertile field,” but do have a flower garden – with accompanying lizards, butterflies, squirrels and hummingbirds -- that I meditate on each morning. I do miss “Some friends whose conversation’s able / To dignify your simple table,” though email and the telephone help.   Bob passed along a link to the original Latin of Martial’s epigram and thirty-three translations into English made across almost half a millennium.