EJ: The influences and interests you describe in A Dropped Glove in Regent Street are mostly European (Borges perhaps being the great exception). At one point you write, ‘a great many writers from this country [Canada] or the one to the south of us, spend half of every year in Europe’. Can you say a bit more about your connection to Europe?

DC: My sense of a close relationship to Europe is a secure one, and I don’t find this (apart from those odd hours which contain an unscheduled stab of longing for, say, Covent Garden and the usually empty Inigo Jones’ church so close by, or, in Cambridge, the path beside a very small stream running alongside Trinity’s tennis courts, or a high-up flat over the Malar-sea in Stockholm or… like that) anything other than a plus in my life. Two excuses for this, one of which I’ve just indicated: I spent my 20s and half of my 30s in one or other European cities, and these are years when, if the world is ever going to open its arms to you these will be the right ones, and for me it did and they were. Nothing new about that, although stuff lingers.

And then there’s art, both visual and literary. The former category points, for me, at Edvard Munch in Norway and Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden in Florence and the endless high-ceilinged walkway of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; and points also at the twenty or thirty mornings I spent, miraculously and with minimal talent, at the St. Martin’s School of Art on Charing Cross Road in a life-drawing class of a dozen girls or women and three boys or men, seven of whom, this is the mentioned miracle, almost at once entered one another’s lives with a vitality and a kind of serious promise which I, so time-confused now when I recall them in their abiding youth that I really shouldn’t be permitted to remember them at all, nevertheless remember and, it seems, love. Love more awarely than I did way back then.

And yes, books. ‘I think that Heaven’, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, ‘will be composed of endless and untiring reading’, and although I once found her ‘untiring’ incomprehensible (who needed heavenly help to read tirelessly?), that was when I could read all day and half the night, happy with what I was up to and, I suppose, content to know that the rest of the world was falling into what another great writer, Nabokov, called ‘the moronic fraternity of sleep’. That was then and this is now, but reading remains my sine qua non; every bit as good and far more reliable than even a decent-level two-out-of-three sets of tennis doubles (much as I have cared for those several-thousand sets ). And this has just about always meant, for me, the reading of European writers, with regard to whom I take the author of Hamlet as nonpareil and then recommence our conversation with Tolstoy, who has very recently survived, no problem, my sixth immersion in the two masterpieces, and who for me obliterates every other fiction-writer to a degree that I wish he would not (though there’ve been dozens of others of great worth, some of them predictable -- George Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Chekhov, Turgenev, Thomas Mann -- and others perhaps less obvious -- Heinrich Böll, all of his touching and simple novels read in German, and individual wonderfulnesses such as Constant’s Adolphe and Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple and sideshelves of shaky but fondly-browsed-in add-ons like Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave. And the poetry of Rilke and Keats and Housman and Milton and Edward Thomas and Larkin. And about forty volumes of literary biography by people like Tomalin and Holmes and Maddox and MacCarthy.

Gertrude Stein writes in a journal that “America will be a good place for writers sometime, but not yet”, and I’m not in the mood to amplify or justify this but will only nod my sixty-years-later head in agreement.

OK, I’ll add just this much. Having a thousand and more years of invoked memory available to you on a walk through any familiar wood, or down (not all, admittedly, but many) centuries’-trodden streets, gazing across battle-history’d fields or waters or the silhouette of a medieval town, turning pages in a book which has endured the touch of Gibbon or Goethe, matters. It can deepen a day’s thoughts.

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