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INTERVIEWER
Perhaps we should concentrate on the phrase establish an oeuvre, which does at least allow that there might have been some very good American novels written.
AMIS
Oh yes, indeed. Individual books, and two or three books or more by many American novelists. But the enemies are smartness, and in many cases, the desire to be American. And being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European, and to give them a distinctive American stamp is something you can't try to do, it can only be hoped that in the end this will emerge. The lure of the Great American Novel—it's no longer, perhaps, the Great American Novel, because that sounds like the dull, or traditional, American novel—but the Important, the Significant, the New, the most American American Novel, that marsh light is still burning hard. |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| E. M. Forster, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Philip Larkin, Anthony Powell, Gore Vidal, Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson, P. G. Wodehouse, John Betjeman, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Taylor, R. S. Thomas, W. B. Yeats |
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