My mother was an ecologist before her time, and bred in me this feeling about land being precious, in some way the ground of our physical being.

Q: Do you find it difficult to keep writing in a cultural context where--as you said once--"homegrown cabbages" like Mailer and Jones are "mistaken for roses"? Do you still stand by that sentence, and is there any tradition you do feel a part of?

A: Since I wrote that sentence Jones's stock has gone down whereas Mailer's has risen. I think that considering Mailer's position at the time it is an apt enough remark. I think Mailer's subsequent career as far as I've kept up with it is a kind of self-resurrection to be admired. I do admire--not without reservation--Armies of the Night: there's a shrillness, and a willingness to accept your personal experience as an artist as metaphor for national experience.

That little bothers me in a sense--all writers do that to some extent. Harry Angstrom is supposed to be some kind of an American. But at least there's tact when you do it as a novel, whereas Mailer's is the sublime conviction that whatever happens to him happens to Them--it's like what's good for General Motors is good for the nation. Still, Armies of the Night was made wonderful by the richness, the ironic complexity of Mailer's view. He does have a very complicated mind at times. I quite like Prisoner of Sex, which I've just read.

It's a mistake to dismiss the book as a male chauvinist oink--it winds up as just that, I suppose, yet it's such a lovingly reasoned and felt-out explanation of how he does feel.

Do I feel part of a tradition? I think any writer to some extent inherits the mid-nineteenth century New Englanders--I think we all benefit from Emerson's marvelous sense of what an American is, from Melville's superb thunder, from Thoreau's jackal and all that.

I'm not too aware of it. I think that the present cultural scene is so changing, that to try to orient yourself very distinctly is just to make yourself sad and miserable. You get into a professional situation where you are a writer, you do it out of habit, you must write a certain number of words a day, the older you get the more old-fashioned you become.

A new kind of mind was produced by raising children on television. I was raised on movies, a different kind of experience entirely. You had to leave the house, you went to a kind of communal place, you saw a rather finished product. And movies of that era were inculcating a kind of Americanism, not of the official sort exactly, but it certainly was a sense...You know, when you saw Bogie stoically shrugging his shoulders, there was a whole world of what it was to be an American: what was right and what was wrong. On television you get this incessant fuzzy melange of little segments of things, and I think it must breed in you a different set of expectations, of notions of what people should be doing. I see nothing wrong with trying to sit in a room and turn out stuff that will repay re-reading. It makes something kind of solid, or at least in its own terms hard to improve. I'm not sure I do it but that's the effort.

I can well imagine that from some standpoints it's a silly thing to do. Print is dying. Who, after all, has the time to read novels. A few people seem to. I don't have time, it isn't what I do.

Q: Are there any things you feel so deeply for that you would abandon your novelist's stance for a Maileresque pose?

A: I'm sure there are--I don't think you quite know until you resist. Mailer himself is not much of a revolutionary. I somehow feel once you introduce the word, you find yourself backtreading or apologizing or something. The threats that have struck me, that have aroused some kind of gut feeling in me, have not been from the right but from the left--I don't know quite why this is, whether I'm so remote from the right that I don't take them seriously at all. I do take people who run the New York Review of Books seriously. I find that their contempt for the democratic system is so pervasive and profound as to be death-dealing and menacing really.

It expresses this everywhere, from the drawings up to the feelings that anybody who has power, who actually tries to make decisions involving the whole society, is ergo corrupt or insane. You get a kind of Calvinist sense of damnation connected with running the machinery--the machinery is going to be there, in any case--you can't revolutionize social machinery. It's a kind of wariness, a kind of unpleasability, a hopeless miasma arises from those pages.

It may be that intellectuals, the kind that get in there are themselves power-seekers, narrow, angry about not having the kind of power. Certainly, a Cambridge party is political to a fault. It could be that the academic world is a microcosm that breathes into it a certain bias, which when applied to the national scene amounts to a negation of the way it's more or less worked for 190 years.

Certainly the New York Review of Books seems to me to have rather little time to give to fiction--it regards fiction both in the space it gives it and the kind of reviews it gets as a pretty silly branch of the written word. I think, of course, fiction can say more things--it can contain ambiguity and it can show issues mixed in with the flesh and blood.

I think novels should become a little more informational. We have less time to read them--they must dehydrate a little, they must draw a little closer to the textures of things like television, newspapers, magazines, so full of facts.

Much of the excitement about the Vietnam involvement is a kind of local event in terms of history. It's certainly a symptom of certain things. It's a symptom of certain things. It's a symptom of the last gasp of pax americana--already things happen in Asia which for the first time we don't have much of a stake in, or nobody blames us for everything that's been happening in the world in the past 20 years. We're coming out of that role; we're becoming for a while just one more country.

It's very important that all of us understand what's happening to us--what history is doing to us in a way very rapidly. We're not even accepting its being done. How should the novel respond to the changes in human nature and the kinds of things that happen--I think that in some funny way the novel traditionally has an ending--things end badly or happily--events have significance--in light of that is somehow we don't live like that now--our sense of irony is so complicated, so the very kinds of stories we tell have to be different. The kind of stories that Salinger wrote in the 50's are different than those written in the 30's