Connor: He sounds like an extraordinary teacher.

Peter: He was a fine writer and editor, too‌—‌without Malcolm Cowley, Viking would never have published Jack Kerouac, and William Faulkner might have been completely forgotten. I was very fond of Malcolm. I didn’t have a beard in those days, just a moustache, and so did he. We used to walk over the campus together, talking, with me mostly asking questions, and a time or two we were taken for father and son.

Connor: That year was the start of many big changes in your life. You discovered California, where you now live, and in particular you fell in love with Berkeley. You met a lot of people who would eventually be important to you.

Peter: Yes. Chief among them Enid, the woman who became my first wife. Her then-husband was in the psychology graduate program at Stanford. I noticed even back then that while the people I met in Berkeley were supposed to be wild, crazy proto-hippies, beatniks, whatever you want to call them…it was the people in that Stanford psychology program that were seriously crazy. There was a good deal of madness, drinking, and mate-trading going on. Somewhere in there I got involved with Enid, who had two daughters from her two marriages. And of course I wrote a lot.

Connor: You were working on your second novel. The one that’s never been published.

Peter: I called it The Mirror Kingdom‌—‌don’t ask me to explain why, because the title didn’t make any sense. Titles have never been my strong suit. The book was very long, very serious, and very autobiographical: a coming-of-age story about a young American musician playing blues and folk songs in a club in Paris. I’d done something like that myself, a little bit, though mostly what I was doing while in France was trading‌—‌I’d teach the French guys stuff from the States, and they’d teach me the lyrics and chords to this or that Georges Brassens song. However, since I always tend to allow my characters to be really good at something I’d like to do properly, such as playing guitar or cooking, in The Mirror Kingdom I made Walker, my book’s protagonist, pretty special as a singer and performer. I wrote that novel about three times while I was at Stanford, trying to make it work, trying to be what I imagined a writer was supposed to be according to what I was hearing and reading in class, and then I submitted it to Viking as a possible follow-up to A Fine and Private Place. They passed‌—‌immediately‌—‌and I buried the manuscript for the next 40 years, until you dug it out of my filing cabinet. I still think burial was the right thing to do.

Connor: You also turned out at least one astonishing piece of short fiction while you were a Stegner Fellow. The Atlantic Monthly published it in 1963, and it has been reprinted dozens of times since‌—‌“Come Lady Death.”