I like dealing with people whose vocabulary and worldview is less media–saturated than ours is. I think that there is an acceleration of a kind of slang shorthand that is very characteristic of our period but not especially beautiful. It is meant to be ephemeral, in a way that when you’re using language that you would consider “hip”—or whatever the present word would be—you are using it in the knowledge that in a year or two years, you would be embarrassed to use the same word.

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I met Dick in the fall of 1956, and thus was initiated a fifty-seven-year-long literary conversation and friendship. In 1956, Dick was just starting out in the University of Chicago English department while I was teaching freshman composition in the College. He was twenty-seven, I was twenty-three. I had just returned from the army to Chicago, where I’d earlier received an MA in English. Dick and I started to talk immediately about writers and books and didn’t stop until just a week or two before his death.

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He could not cover the whole story in his six lectures at Louvain, but he got under way with detailed expositions of a ceremonial chariot race in the Iliad and Oedipus’ belated recognition of his guilt in Oedipus Rex. Between these two moments, Foucault says, we must postulate the emergence of a new kind of legal process, based not on the outcome of a tournament between antagonists, but on the authority of a third party: a judge, with a duty to discern a single truth transcending the clash of claims and counter-claims.

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I came to this task as a journalist, not a literateur, and I have remained one to this day. I have high literary standards and delight in the expression of strong opinion, literary and otherwise, but I also read a book as if I were a reporter: looking for what it is “about” in the deepest sense of the word, determining what matters about it and what doesn’t, trying to give the reader a feel for what it is like as well as passing judgment on it.

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