When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
In history class, I wrote a poem, 'The Royalists and the Roundheads.' I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it.
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.
I became obnoxious to the Jacobins because I reprobated their aristocracy, which aimed at usurping all legitimate authority.
I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.