The chronological order of the events hasn’t been kept
Reminder: the diary comes in form of a play.
The suburbs of Aberdeen, 1989
An old man (who doesn’t wish for his identity to be revealed) is being interviewed by four journalists:
Q:Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating
person. Why is that so?
A: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.
Q:Still there must be things that move you--likes and
dislikes.
A:My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime,
cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to
man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Q:You write everything in longhand, don't you?
A:Yes. I cannot type.
Q:Do you read many new novels? Why do you laugh?
A:I laugh because well-meaning publishers keep sending me--
with "hope-you-will-like-it-as-much-as-we-do" letters -- only
one kind of fiction: novels truffled with obscenities, fancy
words, and would-be weird incidents. They seem to be all by one
and the same writer-- who is not even the shadow of my shadow.
Q:I notice you "haw" and "er"a great deal. Is it a sign
of approaching senility?
A:Not at all. I have always been a wretched speaker. My
vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle
out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a
miracle. I have rewritten-- often several times-- every word I
have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Q:When did you start writing in English?
A:I was bilingual as a baby (Russian and English) and added
French at five years of age. In my early boyhood all the notes
I made on any subject of interest were in English.
In the middle thirties I translated for publication in English
two of my Russian novels,
'The Misanthrope'and 'Three Strange Lovers'(retitled 'Divorced'
in America). The first novel that I wrote
directly in English was 'All These Women'in 1937 in Paris. After
moving to America in 1939,
I contributed poems and stories to The Atlantic and The New
Yorker and wrote four novels. Sterling Holden (1947),
The Red Diary (1955), The Oaks (1957) and Crisis
(1962). I have also published an autobiography,Private
Confessions(1951), and several scientific papers.
Q: How would you describe your works?
A: The passion of science and the patience of poetry. As an artist
and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization,
images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered
wild fruit to the synthetic jam.