How did you arrive at that decision? It was my first time to go abroad. I was fond of the opera and ballet. England was a very serious place in terms of the arts. I attended a performance every night. It was there that I found my way.

What did you want to do?
As far back as I can remember I’ve enjoyed during research. When I returned to Turkey I started writing book reviews in Forum. Yasar Kemal’s Mehmed My Hawk had just come out and I wrote the first review. But I was a bit full of myself in those days. There was an American writer named Robert Penn Warren and I tried to compare Yasar Kemal with him. I came to regret it later. He touches on some of the same problems but actually Yasar Kemal’s strong point is his language. One day years later we met at a dinner. The next thing I knew he was bearing down on me, shouting, “Metin, you made life very difficult for me! You compared me with that man! I’ve read everything he wrote. Where am I like him?” “Youthful pomposity,” I confessed. Based on my writings in Forum, I got a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study ballet, opera and theater in the U.S.