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Mrs. Guinevere
and looked at it. And I found something there I could go on with. So I worked on it all throughthe spring of 1949, and then moved out to Hollywood for the summer. I finished the second half in Hollywood.
Barbary Shore
is really a Hollywood novel. I think it reflected the impact of Hollywood on me in some subterranean fashion. Certainly the first draft is the wildest draft of the three; it’s almost insane, and the most indigestible portions were written in the first couple of months I was in Hollywood. I never knew where the book was going; I had no idea where it would be by tomorrow. I’d wake up and work the typewriter in great dread, in literal terror, wondering when this curious and doubtful inspiration was going to stop. It never quite did. It ground along at the rate of three pages, three difficult pages a day. I got a first draft done and was quite unhappy with it; it was a very bad book at that point. When I rewrote it later, in Provincetown, a summer later, again it went at the rate of three pages a day. The revision was different from the first draft, and I think much better. But working on
Barbary Shore
, I always felt as if I were not writing the book myself but rather as if I were serving as a subject for some intelligence which had decided to use me to write the book. It had nothing to do with whether the work was good or bad. I just had to make do with the fact that I had absolutely no conscious control of it. If I hadn’t heard about the unconscious, I would have had to postulate one to explain this phenomenon. For the first time I became powerfully aware that I had an unconscious, which seemed to have little to do with me.
    SM : How much of a plan did you have for
Barbary Shore?
    NM : None. As I indicated earlier,
Barbary Shore
just birthed itself slowly. The book came out sentence by sentence. I never knew where the next day’s work was coming from.
    SM : You don’t mention [in your description of writing
Barbary Shore]
anything about politics. Wasn’t your
engagement
at the time a considerable part of the plan?
    NM : I think it was the unspoken drama in the working up of the book. I started
Barbary Shore
as some sort of fellow traveler and finished it with a political position that was a far-flung mutation of Trotskyism. And the drafts of the book reflected these ideological changes so drastically that the last draft of
Barbary Shore
is a different novel altogether and has almost nothing in common with the first draft but the names.
    SM : Did Jean Malaquais [to whom the book is dedicated] have much to do with this?
    NM : He had an enormous influence on me. He’s the only man I know who can combine a powerfully dogmatic mind with the keenest sense of political nuance, and he has a formidable culture which seems to live in his veins and capillaries. Since he has also had a most detailed vision of the Russian Revolution—he was steeped in it the way certain American families are imbued with the records of their clan—I spent a year living more closely with the history of Russia from 1917 to 1937 than in the events of my own life. I doubt if I would even have gone back to rewrite
Barbary Shore
if I didn’t know Malaquais. Certainly I would never have conceived McLeod. Malaquais, of course, bears no superficial resemblance whatsoever to McLeod—indeed, Malaquais was never even a Communist; he started as an anti-Stalinist, but he had a quality when I first met him which was pure Old Bolshevik. One knew that if he had been born in Russia, a contemporary of Lenin’s, he would have been one of the leaders of the Revolution and would doubtless have been executed at the trials. So his personality—as it filtered through the contradictory themes of my unconscious—inhabits
Barbary Shore.
    SM : Would you care to discuss what you mean by the “contradictory themes” of your unconscious? It that related to what you said a little while ago about becoming aware of your unconscious while