Parmi eux, Aldous Huxley. Elle date de 1960. Il revient sur ses débuts d'écrivains...
INTERVIEWER : How did you happen to start writing? Do you remember?
HUXLEY : I started writing when I was seventeen, during a period when I was almost totally blind and could hardly do anything else. I typed out a novel by the touch system; I couldn’t even read it. I’ve no idea what’s become of it; I’d be curious to see it now, but it’s lost. My aunt, Mrs. Humphry Ward, was a kind of literary godmother to me. I used to have long talks with her about writing; she gave me no end of sound advice. She was a very sound writer herself, rolled off her plots like sections of macadamized road. She had a curious practice: every time she started work on a new novel, she read Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau. It seemed to act as a kind of trigger or release mechanism. Then later, during the war and after, I met a great many writers through Lady Ottoline Morrell. She used to invite all kinds of people out to her country house. I met Katherine Mansfield there, and Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, and all the Bloomsburies. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Roger Fry. Listening to his talk about the arts was a liberal education. At Oxford I began writing verse. I had several volumes of verse published before I turned to writing stories. I was very lucky; I never had any difficulty getting published. After the war, when I came down from Oxford, I had to make my living. I had a job on the Athenaeum, but that paid very little, not enough to live on; so in spare moments I worked for the Condé Nast publications. I worked for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and for House and Garden. I used to turn out articles on everything from decorative plaster to Persian rugs. And that wasn’t all. I did dramatic criticism for the Westminster Gazette. Why—would you believe it?—I even did music criticism. I heartily recommend this sort of journalism as an apprenticeship. It forces you to write on everything under the sun, it develops your facility, it teaches you to master your material quickly, and it makes you look at things. Fortunately, though, I didn’t have to keep at it very long. After Crome Yellow—that was 1921—I didn’t have to worry so much about making a living. I was already married, and we were then able to live on the Continent—in Italy until the Fascists made life unpleasant, then in France. We had a little house outside Paris, where I could write without being disturbed. We’d be in London part of every year, but there was always too much going on; I couldn’t get much writing done there.