A SINGER OF STORIES
IN HIS NINTH DECADE, ISSAC BASHEVIS SINGER IS AT THE HEIGHT OF
HIS POPULARITY, APPEAL AND PRODUCTIVITY

Author: By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, August 25, 1985
Page: 15
Section: SUNDAY MAGAZINE

As he usually does at this time of the morning, Singer is returning home to his beachfront Collins Avenue highrise in the Surfside area of Miami Beach; it is not far from Isaac Singer Boulevard, a street named for the author after he won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. The walk is just a short one for Singer, who usually walks five miles - 80 New York City blocks, he says - every day. But it is an unvarying part of the routine. He and Alma have just had their breakfast at Sheldon's Drugs, the drugstore and lunch-counter-style restaurant where they begin most days when not at their other homes in New York or Wengen, Switzerland.

He passes a corset shop, a store with orthopedic shoes, a bakery that specializes in low-salt baked goods. This is an old people's neighborhood. Pedestrians move slowly. Drivers move slowly. Everywhere are signs of retirement and advanced age, of spare time to kill: large bellies, Bermuda shorts, bronzed, wrinkled skin, varicose veins. Yiddish - Singer's native tongue and the language now spoken in this country mostly by a shrinking community of aging Jewish immigrants and by Hasidic Jews - is heard on Surfside's streets as often as English is. Restaurant menus offer prune juice, stewed prunes, Jell-O.

Yet here in this aging world of his Yiddish-speaking contemporaries, the Polish-born Singer looks conspicuously out of place. He walks quickly, and he
hasn't a hint of a suntan even though the temperature has been in the 70s and 80s for weeks. He is a thin man, and unlike virtually everyone else in Surfside, he is wearing a tie, a white shirt, heavy black shoes, and a lightweight, blue suit jacket; there is a dressy straw hat on his head. The suit and tie, the hat: It is an Old World appearance that he almost never sheds. He will say later this day that he doesn't know what Bermuda shorts are.

He is in a hurry, he says as he walks. It is 11 a.m., and he has only an hour to spare, because "they" will not leave him alone. "They," Singer explains, is "the telephone." All morning he has been bothered by phone calls - requests for interviews, requests from his readers to review their manuscripts, questions about his work, greetings from admirers, invitations to social gatherings. "They always call, and they say, 'I'm a great fan of yours' and that 'I read you even before the Nobel Prize,' " Singer says, a little sardonically, in his Polish-accented English. He looks beleaguered as he rides silently in the elevator of his apartment building and then unlocks the door of his sunny, one-bedroom condominium.

Although it is Sunday, it is a busy day for Singer. He must prepare for the creative writing class that he teaches every Monday with his friend Lester Goran, a professor of English, at the University of Miami. He has agreed to be interviewed, an obligation that seems more of a burden to him than anything else but one he puts up with because he says he doesn't like to disappoint people. He has a dinner party to go to this evening that he doesn't want to attend. And, of course, he must make time for his writing. He is working on a novel, Der Veg Aheim (The Way Home), which has been running in weekly installments in the New York-based Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Forward. His editor, Simon Weber, is waiting for the next installment, and so are all his readers.

But before long the telephone rings. It is the woman who has invited him for dinner.

"I want to tell you that I don't really feel too well," he objects. "If you can free me . . ."

It doesn't work. "Who is going to be there, tell me?" he asks. "It's a restaurant, isn't it, or in a house? What time will the car come? . . . I will tell you, I don't really feel too well, so if I don't feel well, I will leave earlier."

The woman persists. There is a long silence while Singer listens. Finally, he relents.

"Okay, my friend, I will tell you, even though I don't feel well, maybe I will begin to feel well when I see people around me. Okay, okay, we will make it. . . ."

There is a pause. "And give my best to your husband. Thank you."

In the ninth decade of his life, Singer is at the height of his popularity, appeal, and productivity. In the past year he has launched two new plays off Broadway; published four books, Love and Exile, Stories for Children, Gifts, and The Image and Other Stories; written articles for The New York Times; and published several short stories, including three in The New Yorker, two in Partisan Review, and two in Moment, a Jewish magazine. His serialized Yiddish novels and stories still appear every week in the The Jewish Forward, which he has written for regularly since 1935 and which has published most of his major translated works, including The Magician of Lublin, The Slave, The Manor, The Estate, and The Penitent.

He is said to be the only living Yiddish writer whose translated work has caught the imagination of American readers. Read in 16 languages, Singer has produced a voluminous body of writing, some of it rooted in America, but much of it in the now-vanished world of the shtetls and ghettos of pre-World War II Poland.

In simple, uncluttered prose, he describes a world of horse-drawn droshkies, of pushcarts, fools, wise men, whores, penitents, fanatics, psychics; a world where pious young men wear long gabardines and sidelocks; where intellectuals meet in Warsaw cafeterias to discuss social revolution, Zionism, Kafka, Spinoza. It is a world where the spirits, demons, and dybbuks of Jewish folklore hold court in daily life.

Above all, it is a world that reflects the perpetual human struggle between morality and passion, good and evil, tradition and modernism. His stories trace the direction of human destiny: A married Jewish magician with hidden powers and several gentile lovers eventually isolates himself in penitential solitude to escape the licentious life he loves and fears. A woman is so fiery, vindictive, and filled with rage that fires run after her and ultimately consume her. A vain married woman from Krashnik is consumed by erotic fantasies, finally entering the mirror in her boudoir after a demon seduces her.

Singer's is not exclusively a world of darkness and conflict, however, and it is in part his diversity that has earned him the respect of readers. There are also hilariously funny Singer stories, and children's stories that are gentle and reassuring. And there are tender tales of love and devotion, such as "The Little Shoemakers," a moving story about a hard-working family of shoemakers who hold onto their beloved cobbler heritage despite their move to America; or the celebrated "Gimpel the Fool," about the victim of a thousand practical jokes who narrates his own story with an insight and humor that belie his pathetic gullibility.

Nearly seven years after being awarded the Nobel Prize, Singer still draws huge audiences when he lectures and reads his work. He is constantly sought as a speaker, and he manages to lecture or attend book signings at libraries, Jewish community centers, and colleges an average of four times a month, mostly in New York but sometimes in other parts of the country as well.

He is also sought by interviewers, who are almost always charmed by what they find. They inevitably describe Singer as a captivating and grandfatherly storyteller whose blue eyes literally twinkle when he reads, who is a master of memorable one-liners ("I am a vegetarian for the sake of health - the health of the chicken!"; "God has given me so many fantasies that my problem is not how to get them, but how to get rid of them"), who is witty and energetic and warm. Last April, The New York Times Magazine named Singer one of the "101 Reasons Why New York Is Terrific," along with Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Rockettes.

Part of the reason he is so admired and adored is because he is thought to be a sort of walking museum of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. At his talks, people line up - young, old, students, professors, readers - to tell him how grateful they are to have access to the shtetl world in Poland. "So many of their comments sound the same," says Dvorah Menashe, Singer's secretary and personal assistant. " 'You've brought back my heritage. You've brought my grandparents' world alive.' "

Rosaline Schwartz, curator of the current exhibit about Singer at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, says some people are so moved by Singer's work that they have returned to the exhibit two and three times. ''I've heard people say they have cried here," she says.

"No matter where you go, interest in him never flags," says New York writer Dorothea Straus, the wife of Singer's publisher, Roger Straus; her book Under the Canopy is the story of her 20-year friendship with Singer. "I don't know another writer like him," she says.

Singer continues to draw critical praise as well. Critic-historian Irving Howe has written that Singer is a "genius" whose Yiddish prose has "a verbal and rhythmic brilliance that can hardly be matched." Author Leslie Fiedler, a professor of literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has described him as a "truly mythic writer." Tufts University provost Sol Gittleman, who teaches a course in Yiddish culture, calls Singer ''one of the great fantasizers of Yiddish literature, the Chagall of Yiddish literature."

To be sure, Singer also has his detractors, and they are not in short supply. His writing has been called "bad for Jews," his depiction of women termed "hostile" and "derogatory," his books "too dirty." Some who know him personally say he can be churlish and rude and narrow-minded. They point to the way in which he disparaged Barbra Streisand in newspaper interviews, lambasting Yentl, her film version of one of his stories, as "artistic suicide" that "was absolutely not in the spirit of the story." They say that last spring Singer refused to be interviewed by a film crew from Finland, after he had first agreed to the interview and after the whole crew had flown to Miami.

What is clear, though, to almost everyone associated with him is that there is something truly remarkable about this writer, this small, frail-looking man with a fine, white feather of hair and the ears that rise impishly to a point, whose only formal higher education consisted of 18 months at a rabbinical
seminary.

He is extraordinarily prolific, even now, in his 80s. Singer himself isn't sure exactly how many books he has written, but according to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which issues most of his translated writings, the works that have been published in English include 10 books of short stories, 13 children's books, three collections, and four books of memoirs. Many other stories that have appeared in the Forward have yet to be translated. "I am working now in my old age, together with Dvorah, to rescue some of them from oblivion and publish them in Yiddish and English," Singer says.

Although he has received the most prestigious award that a writer can hope for, and though his stories have appeared in the finest American magazines, he first submits almost everything he writes to the humble Jewish Forward. The 88-year-old weekly, once a daily paper read in virtually every Jewish home across the country, is now a shadow of what it used to be. Its Yiddish- speaking readers are dying out, and its circulation has plunged from 220,000 in 1924 to 25,000 today.

Yet Singer says proudly that he never has missed a day of work for the paper, with the exception of the high holy day Yom Kippur, even though editor Simon Weber says the paper pays Singer "a pittance, compared to The New Yorker." Why does he do it? Simply because, Singer says, he has been connected to it and its readers for so many years. It is part of his routine and keeps him disciplined. It is simply what he does.

His fidelity to the paper is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that some of its readers - people who are in a position to have known the world that he evokes, or at least to know Yiddish well - are among the first to criticize him. Some have viewed Singer with suspicion, accusing him of being sensational, grotesque, profane, and obscene, and arguing that the evil characters, demons, and imps of his fiction are humiliating and inconsistent with Jewish life. "I had been an admirer of Isaac Bashevis Singer until his gremlins and demonology plus his near pornography chilled me," says Lewis Weinstein, a Boston attorney. It has been said that there are religious men in the Forward' s linotype room who refuse to touch his copy, so traif (tainted) is it to their Orthodox sensibilities.

In a way, Singer is a sort of prophet without honor in his own land. Aaron Lansky, who heads the National Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst-based organization devoted to the preservation of Yiddish literature, recalls being in a Jewish library in Montreal the day the Forward arrived announcing that Singer had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The library was filled with Yiddish- speaking men, and he said the news caused an uproar in the reading room. They began to yell and to argue, pulling the paper out of one another's hands to scrutinize it as though they couldn't believe what they had read.

"They were all furious," says Lansky. "A whole debate started over why Singer shouldn't have gotten it."

Why he shouldn't have gotten it, according to some who know Yiddish literature, is that other Yiddish writers deserved it more. The name of poet- novelist Chaim Grade, who died in 1982 and wrote about Jewish life in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars, is one that is frequently mentioned; he is perhaps best known for Rabbis and Wives, his posthumous collection of three translated novellas.

Some Yiddish readers complain that Singer places Jews in a bad light. Some say he should write more like the real Yiddish writers, the 19th- and 20th- century classicists such as Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Moykher Sforim. In their books, critics say, there is still a place for Jewish life in the modern world; in Singer's work, it's either "obedience to law or utter licentiousness," as Aaron Lansky puts it.

Others say they simply find Singer's writing - his contemporary work, at least - unimpressive. "Der Veg Aheim is boring," says one New York reader who has followed Singer's writing in the Forward for decades. "After I read half a column I'm tired of it. He will start out with whatever hits him - I wouldn't start in with the trees and the sunshine always. Sometimes he goes right to the story, but sometimes he keeps writing a lot of description when description is not appropriate to the subject matter."

Yet Singer is apparently unfazed by such reactions. "It is the nature of readers, especially our readers, the Jewish readers, always to complain," he says. "There is no sense in worrying about them. When I sit down to write, I don't write to please the readers. I'm the first reader, and I have to please myself."

Isaac Bashevis Singer has been writing to please himself since he was 16 years old. He was born in 1904 in Leoncin, Poland, the third of four children. His talented older brother, Israel Joshua, whom Singer often calls his ''father and mentor," was the first in the family to make his mark as a writer, publishing such distinguished novels as The Brothers Ashkenazi and Yoshe Kalb; even today some readers call Israel the "real writer" in the family. Their elder sister, Hinde Esther, who lived and died in obscurity and was a depressed, troubled woman, was also a writer of some talent who published under the name of Esther Singer Kreitman. Her autobiographical novel, Deborah, has recently been reissued.

Both of Singer's parents were descended from rabbis, and his father, Pinchos Menachem, was a rabbi as well. Materially poor but spiritually rich, Singer's father was entirely immersed in Hasidic piety, and his one desire in life was "to have the strength to serve God and to study the Torah," as Singer recalls in his autobiographical work, Love and Exile. He believed in miracles and was convinced that mysterious forces were at work in the world. He spoke often in the Singer home about spirits of the dead that possess the bodies of the living, and about houses inhabited by hobgoblins and demons. The secular world was of little interest to Pinchos Menachem, who considered secular writing heretical; when people asked him what his sons did, he would reply, "They sell newspapers."

Like his father, Singer's mother, Bathsheba, was devout, but, as the son writes, "what a difference between the two of them." She was by nature a skeptic, inclined toward more rationalistic views of religion and human behavior. The contrast in their natures and their world views is characterized in a delightful tale by Singer in one of the memoirs of In My Father's Court. He writes of the time that a distraught woman visited Pinchos Menachem with what she called "a very unusual problem": the slaughtered geese that she had bought to cook would shriek when she banged one against the other, even though their heads had been removed. Pinchos Menachem maintained triumphantly that this proved once and for all that omens were sent from heaven. Bathsheba ignored him, insisting that slaughtered geese don't shriek.

The tension in the family mounted. The mighty drama made everybody tremble; the young Isaac, torn between his parents, began to cry. In the end his mother prevailed: It suddenly occurred to her that the woman must have forgotten to remove the windpipes from the birds.

Yet this conflict - the simultaneous attraction to and away from orthodoxy and faith, and the erosive effect of modern beliefs on traditional ways of life - remained part of the son's psychology, and it shows up in much of his writing, even today.

But there were other influences, too. There was Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, the ghetto tenement area where Singer's family moved in 1908 and where his father established a Beth Din, or rabbinical court. It was "a kind of blend of a court of law, synagogue, house of study, and, if you will, psychoanalyst's office where people of troubled spirit could come to unburden themselves," Singer explains in In My Father's Court. There, as a small boy, he silently gathered much of the material that years later Singer the storyteller would recall and embellish in his work: The tales told by Hasidim, the settling of business arguments, the conflicts between couples who seek divorce.

"My father's courtroom was like a school to me, where I could study the human soul, its caprices, its yearnings, its barriers," Singer writes in Love and Exile, a collection of three of his books of memoirs that he characterizes as "spiritual autobiography, fiction set against a background of truth." A boy who loved to read, to fantasize, and to question, he absorbed all of the activity in the courtroom with a curiosity and appetite for detail that astonished and even frightened his mother. "What a memory!" she used to say. ''Let no evil eye befall you."

In 1917 Singer went with his mother to visit her father, the rabbi of Bilgoray. He stayed for four years in the Orthodox, old-fashioned shtetl that had remained unchanged for generations. It, too, proved a strong inspiration for his writing, possibly serving as a model for Goray in his novel about 17th-century false messianism called Satan in Goray, and for many of his short stories.

But it may have been his brother who proved the most decisive influence in Isaac Singer's life. I. J. Singer introduced his brother to Yiddish journalism and theater, and brought home Yiddish translations of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, even Mark Twain. He was a nonbeliever, challenging the father's Orthodoxy and leading the young Isaac toward a new set of secular, worldly, modernistic possibilities.

He also led the way back to Warsaw, where Isaac followed in 1923. There, in the lively city that was Eastern Europe's center of Jewish social and cultural life, Isaac eked out a meager living as a proofreader. He spent hours in libraries where he voraciously read scientific journals and books on philosophy, psychology, astronomy, physics, biology. He developed a fascination with the occult and with psychic research.

And he became acquainted with the diverse community of Yiddish writers and intellectuals who frequented the Writers' Club that appears in many of Singer's stories, although he stayed on the periphery of it himself. He abhorred ideologies and was not won over by the arguments he heard from the Hasidim, anti-Hasidim, atheists, Zionists, Bundists, or socialists. He regarded himself as a skeptic and a loner, though he still felt connected to his Orthodox roots, and ultimately developed his own brand of religion and philosophy. In Love and Exile he called it a "private mysticism: Since God was completely unknown and eternally silent, He could be endowed with whatever
traits one elected to hang upon Him."

In Warsaw, Singer also worked on his writing. But even as a writer he forged his own path. "The themes employed by Yiddish writers and the writing itself struck me as sentimental, primitive, petty," Singer writes in Love and Exile. It was marked by "cliches about social justice and Jewish nationalism, and had remained provincial and backward."

In any case, Jewish literature surely didn't deal with the kinds of concerns Singer was preoccupied with, such as the intense and varied sexual relationships he was beginning to experiment with in Warsaw, one of which produced a son named Israel. Nor did it speak to the resulting sense of conflict and shame that Singer felt about his gnawing and consuming passions. He was, after all, the son of a pious man and one who admitted he still ''retained an idea of a wife as my parents conceived it - a decent Jewish daughter, a virgin."

"I liked women," he writes candidly in Love and Exile. "From the very first I wrote about sex in such a way as to shock the Yiddish critics and often the readers, too."

In Warsaw, Singer contributed stories to Yiddish anthologies and periodicals; the novella Satan in Goray was serialized in the magazine Globus, a Warsaw periodical. But this was not overall a period of great productivity for him. By the time he was almost 30, he writes, "all I had accomplished in Yiddish literature was one novella and several short stories that I had published in magazines and anthologies no one read." In 1935, at the urging of his brother, who had emigrated to America, and because "I was afraid any day Hitler was going to invade Poland," Singer came to New York. He had already parted from his young son (now a journalist living in Israel whom he sees occasionally) and the boy's mother, Runya, who also lives in Israel.

In America he met and married German-born Alma, who helped support him by working as a salesclerk at Lord & Taylor. Here he wrote articles and stories for the Forward, though little more of note until after the premature death of his successful brother in 1945. Many who know him say that until then, he had been intimidated and constrained by his brother's awesome talent. Singer has never returned to Poland.

But in many ways, Singer has never really left it. Most of his characters, even in stories set in America, have ties of some sort to Poland, and his portrayals of Polish life in his European stories are so vivid and fresh and captivating, it is hard to believe he is not still immersed in it. He still writes about the issues that preoccupied him in Warsaw - about the destiny of the modern faithless Jew, about the powers that watch over human beings, about the conflict between passion and morality. In his stories, there is still ''just one step from the study house to sexuality and back again," as he writes in In My Father's Court. It is difficult to fully comprehend his fidelity to the Old World after half a century in America. Singer's explanation, like most of his explanations, and like his writing, is spare and simply put.

"Writers always go back to their young days, to their young loves," he says. "If a writer writes about his life, and he is serious, he will go back there, just like a criminal goes back to the place of his crime. An artist goes back to the place where his work began. He goes back to his roots by instinct."

But there seems to be more at work than instinct in Singer's writing. It is as though he is conscientiously tending the Old World so that it won't disappear. "I have a feeling he doesn't see anything he can't use in his books," says his friend Dorothea Straus. "Consciously or unconsciously he is interested in preserving the culture he left. He notices only what's useful to his writing. I don't think he has ever been on the beach. He never spends money on anything, as far as I can tell. He'll turn wherever he is into the streets of Poland."

He seems practically oblivious to the world beyond his own internal one. He
rarely goes to movies or watches television, and he says he doesn't read much fiction, "because I have no time." He has never learned to drive a car or ride a bicycle. He isn't sure what number his apartment is and has to check with Alma when he is asked. He has no conception of how to find his class at the University of Miami. The English department has hired a limousine to pick him up each week, and all he can tell the driver is that he has to go "near a fountain." There he waits quietly until someone in the class comes to find him.

He depends on two women to run interference with the outside world for him. There is his devoted and fiercely protective Alma, who tries, usually futilely, to discourage Singer from working so hard; who packs his lunch in a paper bag every week before he goes off to teach, even though he brings it back untouched because he forgets to eat it; who fondly calls him "Duelly" and refers proudly to the time "we won the Nobel Prize."

And there is Dvorah Menashe, his 31-year-old, vivacious personal assistant who 10 years ago attended a class Singer taught at Bard College, two hours north of New York City, and spontaneously offered to be his chauffeur. He accepted. She now arranges his appointments, helps him with research, and translates some of his stories. With her dark, thick hair, her penetrating blue eyes, the jeweled drop earrings and lacy black sweater she wears, she looks uncannily Eastern European, like a character from one of his books. She has even begun to talk like Singer. "God forbid something should happen to him," Menashe will say, "he should live until 120."

After all these years, writing remains at the center of his world, which is in many ways routinized and unglamorous. He eats simple meals, frequently in cafeterias - eggs, hot cereal, boiled potatoes, kasha. He seldom attends synagogue, though he says he believes in God and prays all the time. "But at my age, why should I go to shul (synagogue) to say to the Almighty what I want to say? I can say it at home, or in the street."

His routine begins "in the morning, about 8, 9, and if they let me do my work, I sit down to do my work," Singer says. He writes longhand in a small Yiddish scrawl on 6-by-8-inch pieces of lined paper, drawing on remarkable powers of discipline and concentration. Interruptions are barely noticed; he will answer the telephone in the middle of a story and pick up its thread as though the conversation had never happened. Watching him compose "is like watching a movie unfold," says the University of Miami's Lester Goran, a novelist who has worked with Singer on translations and says Singer has an extraordinary rapport with his characters. "He experiences all the attitudes of the characters. He even changes his voice with different characters" while working on the translations.

Afternoons are also spent working, answering letters and the telephone, reading proofs, working with a translator to refine his stories in English. He prefers to write in Yiddish because he says it is the only language he really knows well. He maintains that "their English is more real than mine. Mine is like taking out from a book."

"He is so much a perfectionist," says Dvorah Menashe. "Every story, he says, 'I will polish until it will shine.' " Sometimes he meets with work associates or friends, among them the Forward' s editor Simon Weber, Roger and Dorothea Straus, and Lester Goran; his friends, Menashe says, tend to be people connected with publishing. "His work is so much his life, his breath. That's his social life."

Often he takes time to talk with readers. And despite his protests that he ''could do with less" attention, it is clear that part of him thrives on it. He will obligingly stay for an hour after his readings to sign books and chat: "I don't want suddenly to push away people just because I got the Nobel Prize," says Singer. His telephone number is listed in the Miami phone book. Despite a warning to an interviewer that he has little time to spare, he can hardly restrain himself from interviewing her, and the hour stretches on. ''Have

you read my book The Penitent ?" "Have I signed your book?" "Do you get at home The New Yorker ?"

Still, he is a challenge to understand. It is difficult, for instance, to reconcile the Singer who is an avowed conservative about marriage (Alma, he says proudly, is "a good wife") with the one who says openly, "If I have sinned I have only sinned in this respect - love," and who last year told an interviewer from a Jewish women's magazine: "It is true that after having a home, I still behaved for years, and I still do, like a man who lives in furnished rooms. I mean I try to steal some of my bachelorhood pleasures."

Many who are close to Singer describe him as "hard to peg" and "a loner." "There are many things I don't understand about him," says the Forward' s Simon Weber, who considers himself one of Singer's closest friends. ''I just take him as he is."

Publicly, though, Singer is a virtuoso. He is animated, courtly, warm, and genuinely curious about the people he meets with, striking up conversations about almost anything; with women he can be flirtatious and irresistibly engaging. Stories roll off his tongue - how the imps have hidden his mail, how he buys shoes that don't fit "because I didn't want to disappoint the clerk."

"He's really nice to talk to," says Maxine, the waitress who serves him every day at Sheldon's Drugs in Miami. "He told me about when he got the award from Sweden. He tells me stories of his hometown. He always makes you feel good."

And so he continues to be pursued by fans and to write, apparently caring little that some of his recent works have met with mixed, even harsh, reviews, and that some critics have said he has passed his prime as a writer. In 1983 The New York Times Book Review called The Penitent "his worst book," and his newest work, The Image and Other Stories, which he describes as "one of my very best," has received both praise for its stunning prose and criticism for its formulaic sameness.

Writing, he has said, is the only thing he can do, and it is inconceivable that he would stop. Sometimes he gets nervous before he starts to write, but that doesn't matter much at this stage of the game: "And if I get nervous, so what? So I'm nervous."

Yes, he will acknowledge, it is still a struggle to write. "But I like to struggle," he says. "You can only be victorious if you fight, so if I struggle and I think that I have managed to do what I wanted, to me this is a little victory."

DOCKRE;07/25,15:11 LDRISC;08/27,13:53 SINGER1