George Woodcock
I was unpopular at school just because I was an intellectual. I always answered all the questions off the top of my head but they nevertheless resented because of that.
I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary.
I was allowed to wander where I could. Here is a case in which you search for your independence and allow something creative to come out of that.
I suppose, a person for whom freedom is the most important thing - intellectual freedom and, as far as possible, physical freedom.
I suppose I'm led to do so by the fact of what happened to my contemporaries - people whom I've admired, people who I thought were ten times better than me when I was in my twenties and early thirties. I may have been right.
I remember people who tagged along a bit and our world was full of contempt and fury against them. I used to tolerate them because I thought they were benighted soulsbut Orwell didn't. He just hated them with a bitter fury.
I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
I don't have all that many friends who are writers. I know their problems, but I don't know the problems of painters.
I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing.
I believe in that connection between freedom and the city.
I began even as a boy to realize how wide the world can be for a man of free intelligence.
Earle Birney, yes. Earle that was an odd sort of relationship, stormy at the time, very stormy. Earle was a very bad-tempered man and a vain man, but nevertheless.