Yes, I think every reader likes to have "tribute" paid to his imagination—he likes to have the author paint a vivid outline but not crowd it with unnecessary detail.
When I read a story, which is seldom, it is usually a classic or a well-established piece of fiction and I think I am reading it because of its excellent technique and very little because of imaginative pleasure. When I write stories I have the unbounded egotism of the creative mind—my people and their troubles and triumphs are so real and so very acute that I am on mental tiptoes until they are out of the depths and on to the heights!
No.
Konrad Bercovici: I am hard put to answer. The more I write the less I read. I find it interferes with my work. Reading a story carefully takes out of me quite as much as if I were to write a story. And except in rare cases I have not found any story worth while enough to allow it to do that to me. It is all a question of intensity, I suppose, but my ears actually do ache after a concert. Not because my ears are too weak, but because I listen with such intensity. I read in the same way as I listen to music. I never studied solid geometry or other mathematics. I have no stock pictures for anything. I would become crazy if I did because I hate to see the same thing twice. My imagination never behaves properly either when reading or writing a story. I suppose if the imagination were an independent individual and it actually acted instead of imagined, it would be kept in prison for the rest of its natural life!
Tools of trade? My God, I have never considered them such. I consider myself as belonging to the minstrel class, born about five hundred to six hundred years too late. Otherwise I should enjoy nothing better than traveling from market-place to market-place and telling stories to the assembled peasantry or at some inn. All story-tellers,—as a matter of fact, all artists, are modern minstrels. Just born to amuse the people who toil and work.
Ferdinand Berthoud: I read so little of other men's work that it is hard to say. I suppose I do see the actual happenings and actors, and not the printed words as printed words.
Of course in my own writing I live the story and am actually a part of it. Live in another world as I write it. In each of my small few stories so far I am in either a large or small part one of the actors. I see myself and see and hear the other men—always personal friends or men I have lived with and quarreled with. I see the grass waving, can hear the horses' footfalls and smell the sweet clear air. The peculiar scentless smell of the open African veldt is always there. I feel so much a part of the thing that when I finish my stint and come back to myself and look at the walls of the room where I write I am in a state of semi-collapse.
No, I don't feel the actual pain in other men's stories or my own, but more than once in describing scenes of torture the impressions have been so vivid that they've turned my stomach and I've had to lie down for half an hour or so to get right again. I've seen the "remains" after torture, so perhaps that accounts for it.
The pictures I see are in their natural colors. Details distinct and solid—not flat as in a moving picture. What I mean to say is that they are firm and rounded, like a picture by Millet.
No, I have no stock pictures of cowboys and such things, particularly village churches. In the course of years of wandering I've seen so many places that no one is ever uppermost in my mind.