A: "I know there's one more I don't even know about." That's what he says. This last one never sleeps, and watches all three of us." What's your question? I have--

Q: The idea of a quadrephenic personality.

A: Well later on in the book. These are signs that I believe, are clinical symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia. And what I have done by setting up another person in his head--which is the one that wants to kick Kagle, it's not him--it's almost suggesting the idea of a split personality, although it's not. But he, himself is tending to somewhat because he's saying, "There's somebody inside me who wants to do these things that I'm ashamed of I'm too nice a guy to do this." Then he has to create a third one, to supervise the other two. The a fourth one that's watching everything--he never sleeps, never lets anything go too far. What I'm trying to do is set up again a process of alienation from oneself: "depersonalization," that's another clinical term.

And later in the book he has two passages in which he talks about how he's got a universe in his head, maybe three times, where he imagines multitudes of people lurking around in his head and, I think, some he knows and some he doesn't. They're the people he thinks about, the people who infest his dreams. Sometimes he thinks he wants to get them all out in the open, like a policeman and line them up to see who they are. That's the kind of thing, I think, a schizophrenic would have. Except Slocum never is a schizophrenic; it's a schizoid formation, which normal people have, it's about being schizophrenic. And I'm using that deliberately.

Q: What are you driving at with that kind of schizophrenic portrait?

A: I don't know. I mean I can't say now. What I'm dealing with is a disorganized personality, a personality that can't be integrated in a way that the healthiest of personalities should be, the way more and more people I know about, people having trouble integrating their personality so solidly that there's never any anxiety, never any doubt or irrational feelings of inadequacy, never these kids that they can't understand. It's becoming harder and harder for people to achieve in their work, for a personal senses of identify or integration of personality.

Q: William Faulkner talked about modern novelists in his Nobel speech and how they have to deal with conflicts of the heart, with pride, and love, and lust. And it seems here in Something Happened you're dealing with nothing more than a kind of middle-class angst.

A: Well, it's not different from what I think Faulkner was talking about if we can understand what he meant. Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech is not really very intelligible to people now. At the time he made it the newspapers loved it because it had this language of sentiment and antiquity. I would think the Slocum is dealing very strongly in the same way that Faulkner's characters were. But I would not like to measure Something Happened against Faulkner's statement, in Faulkner's terms. You see, Faulkner is speaking romantically; we no longer speak romantically. We know that the only conflict the heart has is whether it keeps beating or not; if the artery gets a clot. We don't have conflicts of the heart, we have conflicts of the head. That's what I mean by his speech being romantic. What he means by conflicts of the heart can now be interpretted as conflicts of the mind, about the emotions. He was talking as if the heart were the center of the emotions, which was a great thing for song-writers of the thirties and forties.

And when Faulkner said at the end of his Noble Prize speech that man would endure I don't think anybody today would take him seriously. Of course not writers, which isn't saying that it doesn't bother me. But I think it was poetic expression