Picasso: “I travel in my head”

From previously unpublished excerpts of a 1978 interview with Susan Sontag by Jonathan Cott, published in Harper’s, 2013 August, p. 19.  Boldfacing mine.

Jonathan Cott: For a lot of people who know your name and love your work, you have a special mystique. There are particularly a great number of women I know who admire you enormously.

Susan Sontag: But what you call mystique used to be called reputation.

Cott: I think in your case it’s reputation and mystique, because you’re not a public celebrity who gossips in the media about whom you’re going out with.

Sontag: Well, what serious writer ever did?

Cott: I could go through a list.

Sontag: But those people have destroyed themselves as writers. I think it’s death to one’s work to do that. Surely the work of writers such as Hemingway or Truman Capote would be on a higher level if they hadn’t been public figures. There is a choice between the work and the life. It’s not just a question of whether you’re going to give interviews or talk about yourself; it’s a question of how much you live in society, in that vulgar sense of society, and of having a lot of silly times that seem glamorous to you and to other people.

Cott: But think of the Goncourt brothers, who wouldn’t have written what they did unless they frequented parties almost every night in Paris during the Second Empire. In a way, they were extraordinarily brilliant and high-class gossip types.

Sontag: But they were also social historians using both the novel and documentary forms. Even Balzac did that. The problem, however, is a little different in the twentieth century, since the opportunities are so much greater. Somebody once asked Picasso why he never traveled abroad. He went from Spain to Paris and then moved to the south of France, but he never went anywhere. And he said: I travel in my head. I do think there are those choices, and perhaps you don’t feel them so much when you’re young — and probably you shouldn’t — but later on, if you want to go beyond something that is simply good or promising to the real fulfillment and risk-taking of a big body of work, you have to stay home.

Is Kafka great?

From “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?” by Joseph Epstein in The Atlantic, July/August 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/is-franz-kafka-overrated/309373/.

[…]

All of which brings up the question of whether Franz Kafka is truly a major writer. His greatest proponents, insisting that he is, cannot say why, and ask for a permanent moratorium on conventional criticism of his writing. His detractors, a distinct minority, feel that what he left us is the sad story of a lost soul destroyed by modern life. In the end, Henry James wrote in an essay on Turgenev, what we want to know about a writer is, “How does he feel about life?” Kafka found it unbearably complicated, altogether daunting, and for the most part joyless, and so described it in his fiction. This is not, let us agree, the best outlook for a great writer. Great writers are impressed by the mysteries of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them.