I'm very happy that such a nice audience on a nice evening should welcome the beginning of the Conference on the Contemporary Novel. On our Conference on Poetry some years ago, it was said that the conference was a nest of singing birds. On the Conference on Literary Criticism last year, if it were birds, it might have been crows. They live on each other's bones, these critics.

I shan't attempt before the conference to describe the Conference on the Novel because here we have novelists and critics together. That isn't my duty after all. As director of the summer session, it's my privilege to introduce the gentleman who will preside over these meetings and to whom, in large part, the distinguished roster of participants is due. He has persuaded them to come.

Professor Carvel Collins, a professor of English literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is one well known to those who follow American literature, alas he has not been able to produce his own particular hero. He is the biographer of Faulkner. I gather that the only way to produce Faulkner is to have his daughter graduate at an exercise and all the colleges in the country are trying to get Ms. Faulkner to come and be a graduate of those colleges. I'm sure that when she gets to a college, there will be no doubt about her graduating from that college.

Mr. Collins has just come back from a trip trying to persuade Faulkner to violate his sacred principle and come up here. And alas, Penn Warren, who was to have come has just had a child. And being his first, he takes it very seriously and isn't likely to depart.

Mr. Collins is one of these students of American literature who is interested in the roots of things, and particularly in the period just before the Civil War. His book on the American sporting gallery has, I think, given some of the best grassroots history of that period. And if he doesn't start singing "On the road to California, oh, it's a long and a tedious journey far across the Rocky Mountains," he'll be out of character tonight.

His articles and published portions of his book on Faulkner's fiction show his interest in American folklore. And he will have an ample opportunity, I think, in presiding at these meetings to relate American folklore and the characters of American fiction to some of the most distinguished novelists and critics of our times. It's with great pleasure that I turn the meeting over to Mr. Carvel Collins.

APPLAUSE

The plan of these three nights is a fairly simple one. There will be two talks of approximately a half an hour each, each night, followed by a commentator who will discuss the two talks, and we hope further entangle the two speakers and arguments with each other. Then we hope to have sort of rebuttals and general conversation from the group on the stage, followed by questions from the audience.

This evening, I would like to run through the-- right now, the three evenings, the program. The first speaker this evening will be Mr. Stanley Hyman. The second speaker, Mr. Frank O'Connor. And Mr. Anthony West will comment on their two speeches.

Tomorrow night, the first speaker will be Mr. Simenon. And the second speaker will be Mr. Ellison. And Professor Frohock will comment on their two papers.

On the third evening, we will have two publishers-- one publisher of hardback books, Mr. William Sloane, and another publisher of paperback books, this being one of the issues in literature in our time, Ms. Hilda Livingston. And then the group here, these authors, will have a chance to discuss things with the publisher in a more general way than perhaps they've been accustomed to.

And since presumably these are publishers who are operating off the record and outside the business, I hope that there can be some genuine disagreement, which is, of course, of interest to all of us. The program this evening is to deal with the how and why of the modern novel, and perhaps, the question, more than that of the question of should certain things be going on in the modern novel. From conversation with the two first speakers, I believe that we are in for an evening of the kind of disagreement that, as I said before, is very important and interesting to all of us.

The first speaker, Mr. Stanley Hyman, is an extremely well-known critic. He is a teacher of literature at Bennington College. His book, The Armed Vision, is a handbook for all those who want to know in skillful detail what many of the leading critics of our time stand for and what their good and bad points are. And Mr. Hyman's subject this evening is new trends in the contemporary novel.

APPLAUSE

Some trends in the novel, that is. The concept of trends in the novel or trends in any literary form is, of course, artificial, a retrospective abstraction. But it is sometimes a convenience. No writer writes anything as part of a trend, but that annoyingly articulate reader we call the critic sometimes follows after the writer at a safe distance, picking up work already done and trending it.

Never very rewarding at any time, this park custodian activity would seem particularly luckless at present when the novel appears to be in a curious period of stagnation with all the old trends largely played out and no new developments yet very tangible. Naturalism, which has been the main line of our fiction, at least since Dreiser, seems now to consist of no more than Caroline Slade's gentle documentaries on the theme of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore or vast pointless excursions into the slums with such writers as Willard Motley and Leonard Bishop.

In its more lyrical form, as such a writer as Sherwood Anderson represents it, naturalism can now claim only earnest, decent and essentially talentless writers, like Albert Halper or Alexander Baron in England. That flood of naturalism, so overpowering in the '30s. The left wing or proletarian novel seems to have dried up almost without a trace, leaving only a few stagnant puddles where writers like Howard Fast and Albert Maltz continue to work.

Naturalism as ironic melodrama as we knew it in such books as James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? seems to have persuaded a whole generation of young European writers under Gide's leadership that the American novel is virile and significant. But by the time Europe learned about it, this tradition was already as stone-cold dead as the marathon dancing and flagpole sitting it celebrated and so much resembled.

Three somewhat unattractive trends in the novel seem clearly visible at present, although perhaps they have always been clearly visible and represent no more than the statistical tendency of most novels at any given time to be rather bad ones. In any case, they are undeniable trends. And before peering about under rocks for more hopeful signs, we might pause to note them.

The first is a tendency of our established and most famous writers to parody their own earlier work or rewrite it downward. We might regard this as the Louis Napoleon principle.

LAUGHTER

Following Marx's engaging suggestion made when he was a political journalist and before he took his own historical laws quite so seriously that every historical event is shortly afterwards followed by its parody, inducing Louis Napoleon's revolution a generation after Bonaparte's as his typical example. Our leading novelists seem to be devoting themselves to the demonstration of this principle with a unanimity that is one of the most depressing features of the current stagnation in our fiction.

Thus, Hemingway rescues himself from the critical obituaries that followed across the river and into the trees by writing a compact and moving work, The Old Man and The Sea, that turns out on examination to be his fine short story, "The Undefeated," done over again with less power. Where the aging bullfighter was heroic in failure and tragic in stature by his stubborn refusal to admit defeat and incompetence, the aged fisherman is sentimentalized to be somehow victorious in principal. His fish skeleton, a more worthwhile capture than any amount of merchandise for the market by means of the author's change of the rules in the course of the game. Where the form of the undefeated was heroic tragedy, the form of The Old Man and The Sea might be called Christian comedy, in which faith and grace automatically redeem from worldly failure.

Faulkner has similarly in a recent book, Requiem for a Nun, rewritten an earlier work, Sanctuary, to give its protagonist-- one can hardly say heroine-- some of the doom-ridden grandeur of the Sartorises, where Sanctuary had a symbolic rightness in the temple's innocent natural evil allowed her to pass unscathed through the wildest Jacobian melodrama and artificial evil, more sinning than sinned against. The Athenian framework of retribution and redemption, temple is made to bear in Requiem for a Nun serves only to take her out of her corncob sanctuary into a dimension where she and the characters around her simply become ridiculous.

In the same fashion, Steinbeck's carefree fantasy world of Tortilla Flat has become the self-conscious moral slum of Cannery Row. And O'Hara has rewritten Appointment in Samarra with a female hero as a rage to live, demonstrating that where Julian English's speedy doom could achieve a kind of meteoric brilliance prolonged over Grace Caldwell Tate's long lifetime, it possesses only a seeping dullness.

When we add to these the law of entropy in Farrell's trilogies and tetrologies slowly running down, each with measurably less life in it than the last, and Dos Passos' recent trilogy that reads like some cruel satire on USA, we have not much left to boast of in the recent work of our important novelists.

A second trend might be called the disguises of love, taking its title from Robie Macauley's recent novel. One of the oddest of these disguises is the writing of stories about homosexual love in the imagery of heterosexual love. I have elsewhere discussed this Albertine strategy for Proust's Albert made Albertine is surely the godfather of all such operations. And here would only note the nature of the strategy and a few examples.

At its simplest, it is simply metamorphosizing a boy with whom the male protagonist is involved into a girl. As in Corvo's The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole with its boyish girl gondolier, Zildo. Or the mannish Mexican girl, Amada, who moves in with the writer in Tennessee Williams' short story, "Rubio y Morena."

We see its more complicated form in Robin Maugham's novelette, The Servant, where a wicked man servant corrupts a weak-willed young English gentleman by means of a preposterous, adolescent nymphomaniac, he sneaks into the house eventually estranging him from his noble fiancée. And on examination, both girls turn out to be only symbolic vehicles for homosexual love of the young gent. The nymphomaniac for the servant's nasty love and the fiancé for the male narrator's pure love leaving our original polygon a rather odd triangle.

I would submit that this Albertine strategy underlies such fiction as Paul Bowles, Frederick Buechner, and Williams' own more complicated The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, underlies such plays as a Streetcar Named Desire and all derivatives like William Inge's Picnic, where a Kowalski-like natural male animal breaks through the defenses of a conventional seeming young woman, and underlies such films as, All About Eve.

Robie Macaulay's The Disguises of Love, on its appearance was reviewed in The New Yorker by our perceptive commentator for this evening, Mr. Anthony West, with considerable attention to the fact that in it, the usual relations between the sexes in our culture seem to be curiously reversed. Mr. West noted that, in essence, the frail pushover of a hero, Professor Graeme was villainously seduced and his life ruined by a heartless young female student, Frances, who determined to have her will of him to the extent of reserving a double room with bath for their first date.

I would argue that all the book's absurdity disappears when it is regarded as a sophisticated example of the Albertine strategy, with Francis simply a male student named Francis, with an I, and enough clues in the book's title, constant preoccupation with the theme of gender reversal, and imagery to suggest that here, we may have the strategy's conscious parody-- that Macaulay may have not only anticipated our investigations, but even assisted them by pointing up the evidence. Other current varieties of love's disguises can be dealt with in a more perfunctory fashion. One of the most widespread is a kind of infantile regression, where happiness is equated with a pre-sexual or pre-genital attachment to an older woman or women.

Perhaps the best example of this is the fiction of Truman Capote, particularly The Grass HarpThe Member of the Wedding is a similar exercise in regression. It is worth noting parenthetically how readily these infantile fantasies seem to adapt for the stage, as is the entire literary output of William Saroyan.

The child-centered world of JD Salinger's fiction, where ambiguous attachments to girl children are the constant refuge from a distressing adult life, shows a similar tendency. But Salinger seems to me a writer of far too much talent and seriousness to remain permanently fixed on this level. With other variants of the sexual impulse, the sadistic nastiness in Steinbeck's East of Eden, the novels of Edgar Mittelholzer, or recent Erskine Caldwell, the kiss-and-tell tradition as it diminishes in interest from Henry Miller to Maud Hutchins, we need have no particular concern.

A third and most widespread trend consists of those books that appear to be novels and are not. They might be called "pseudo-fictions" on the analogy of I. A. Richards' pseudo questions and pseudo statements, which would not only name them accurately-- they are false fictions, rather than non-fictions-- but might lend our activities some of the optimistic "semantics will save us" tone of a quarter of a century ago, as though all these complicated matters could readily be put in order. We must insist not on a definition, but on certain minimal requirements-- that fiction is an exercise of the moral imagination, that it organizes experience into a form with a beginning, middle, and end, and that it's centered around a dramatic action.

A pseudo fiction may be quite a good work of its sort, although most of them are not. What must be recognized is that its sort is not the form we have traditionally called the novel. The appreciation the pseudo fiction aims at is, "yes, that is just what it must be like." The inescapable sense any work of the fictive imagination from Don Quixote to The Weavers Grave gives is, life is surely nothing like this anywhere. This is art.

We can readily see what pseudo fictions are by contrasting the moving and effective reporting of John Hersey's Hiroshima with the pretentious disguised reporting of the same writer's The Wall, or even more clearly by contrasting Budd Schulberg's pseudo fiction about F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Disenchanted, in one direction with Arthur Mizener's brilliant biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, in the other direction with Fitzgerald's own truly effective rendering of the same pathetic story, Tender As The Night.

In recent years, we have had the political or current event's pseudo fiction of Lionel Trilling's The Middle Of The Journey, and Erwin Shaw's The Troubled Air, the former enormously better than the latter, but absolutely comparable in kind. The pseudo fiction about the war in such wordy bestsellers as From Here To Eternity, The Naked And The Dead, and The Caine Mutiny-- biographical and autobiographical pseudo fictions by Angus Wilson and Mary McCarthy, and some particularly uninteresting pseudo fictions about a fake new generation, the Beat Generation, by such beat generators as Calder Willingham and Chandler Broussard.

Particularly ominous are the examples of several English novelists, who seem to fall into pseudo fiction when they are tired, as our own established novelists fall into self-parody. Thus, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, who created truly imagined political fiction and semi fiction in Darkness At Noon and Down and Out in Paris and London, failed to do anything of the sort in the journalism of Thieves In The Night and 1984. Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh have continued to grind out works of satiric intent long after the imaginative grasp that made their earlier works novels was exhausted.

Diaries, journals, familiar essays, war experiences, newspaper columns, sociology, religious parables-- everything from an account of making a movie in Africa with John Huston to the inside dope on the Jelke ring is given a thin veneer of fictionalizing these days and published as a novel, while the few works of authentic fiction brought out each year wither on The New York Times and "Bear in Mind" list. Now that the novel no longer sells as it did in comparison with nonfiction, it will be interesting to see whether the next decade reverses the process and gets us our Moby Dicks as the whales around us.

Before we take a look at some trends in the novel that seem more hopeful, one reservation suggested above needs re-emphasis. Put most simply, it is that bad works can share the preoccupations of good. Insofar as discussion focuses on problems of theme and value, as this one has, it should be obvious that a very poor book can share its theme and values with a masterpiece, without acquiring any of the masterpiece's virtues.

These categories of hopeful trends are thus no guarantee of quality. And in fact, each category includes a very mixed bag of works, not at all meant to be exhaustive. A novel can be deliberately produced with every feature of major fiction, and still somehow fail to come alive, which is my impression of the novels of Robert Penn Warren, although I am defensively aware how much my view is a minority one.

With that out of the way, let me say that the most hopeful direction fiction seems to me to be taking at present is toward the conscious use of myth and ritual as an organizing principle. The tendency in literary discussion is to speak of myth alone. But since in actual terms, the two are inseparable, the myth being nothing more or less than the story or spoken correlative of the rite, we would do well to consider them together whenever we can. A work of fiction that emphasizes myth and slights the physical reality of ritual tends to be thin and heady-- in my opinion, the trouble with Mann's Joseph novels-- whereas a work of fiction centered on both, like Mann's shorter Death in Venice or Mario and the Magician, has a depth and resonance that is one of the sure signs of major art.

A recent work that seems to me resonant in its use of myth and ritual in precisely this fashion is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, organized around a theme that has been basic to American fiction from Moby Dick to The Great Gatsby, the ancient ritual myth of the quest. Ellison's nameless hero pursues the secret of visibility, his own fully human identity as the knight of romance pursued grail castle, and breaking through the enchanted wood of the "keep this n--- boy running" practical joke that is the book's key metaphor, an act as seen in Kenneth Burke's terminology. He achieves at the end, if not the goal of fully conscious humanity, at least a sure footing on the spiral stairway to it.

Another recent work organized on the framework of the quest, The Palm-Wine Drinkard by a young West African named Amos Tutuola, makes an instructive comparison with Invisible Man. Tutuola's story, the drunkard's pursuit of his dead palm-wine tapster into the Town of the Deads, is a complicated ritual of the quest without any kind of mythic or intellectual structure to give it focus or coherence. It is without, in short, the tradition of the picaresque novel behind it. And ultimately, the book becomes only a series of fantastic adventures, projecting such attitudes of Tutuola's culture as the weird money economy and the terrified loathing of children, the way a Rorschach test might.

Similarly, we could note the Huckleberry Finn framework of the rites of passage, the series of ceremonial initiations leading to maturity in Shirley Jackson's Hangs A Man, a book I find it difficult to discuss, or in a more fragmentary form, in Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye. Salinger's book suffers technically from its reduction to the limited vision and vocabulary of a 16-year-old boy, with the addition of an adult narrator's perspective to the novel. Capable of adding a myth adequate to its rights, it might have been not the engaging tour de force we were given, but the substantial imaginative work for which Salinger so clearly shows the potentiality.

Even in the historical novel, we have recently had, in Jay Williams unfortunately titled The Rogue From Padua, the kind of centering of dramatic action in ritual rather than history that we had previously only seen glimpses of in Naomi Mitchison rather stilted The Corn King and The Spring Queen. Williams' account of the peasant wars in Germany in the agonistic terms of ritual witchcraft can probably do nothing to stem the torrent of historical novels, as many-breasted as the Asiatic Artemis. But it can at least keep alive the tradition of the form's potentiality.

The theme of the sacrificial victim or expiratory ritual, embracing such diverse works as Kafka's The Trial, Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, and James Gould Cozzen's Castaway, takes on a curious postwar topicality in Jocelyn Brooke's recent The Scapegoat. Where even a work we tend to call nonfiction, like Thoreau's Walden, centers around a year's cycle of death and rebirth and identifies its form with a quest for a horse, a hound, and a turtle dove, it is not hard to see that these rituals or symbolic actions of initiation, rebirth, and redemption lie very close to the center of aesthetic experience. And their conscious use by the novelist would seem about as artificial as his conscious use of human life for his subject matter.

A second hopeful trend in our fiction seems to me something we probably have to call, despite the term's pomposity, pre-existentialism. In his book Existentialism From Within, E. L. Allen writes, "Existentialism is an attempt at philosophizing from the standpoint of the actor instead of, as has been customary, from that of the spectator." I have to take Dr. Allen's word on that, since I am as innocent of philosophy as Emerson's cutworm. But if we accept the definition, its immediate relevance to a certain kind of novel is obvious.

I would call pre-existentialist that fiction that comes to the view independently as a discovery in the novelist's craft, rather than formally pushing a wheelbarrow full of speculative thought. Richard Wright's Native Son, and particularly his novelette The Man Who Lived Underground, seemed to me examples of the first. His recent The Outsider, deliberately patterned on French existentialist fiction, an example of the second. Kenneth Burke's novel as a series of declamations, Towards A Better Life, would be almost the proto-existentialist work of fiction in our time, its rhetorical form a brilliant device for the self-exposure of motives.

Novels we had once thought were primarily political, like Malraux's Man's Fate and Celine's earlier work, now seem obviously pre-existentialist in their reduction of all our large, vacant generalities to the crises of individual human action. As the example of Wright ironically suggests, Negro experience in America would seem to predispose a novelist to this approach more than any length of time spent in Paris. And Mr. Ellison has elsewhere discussed-- and I hope we'll touch on here tomorrow night-- the break in American sensibility typified by Hemingway's dismissal of the freeing of Jim in Huck Finn as a false note, and the consequent renunciation of a whole depth of insight into the nature of American experience that our 19th century fiction had possessed.

Pre-existentialism may, in fact, be a characteristically Negro-centered note in our fiction. And as we might expect it is a major aspect of Faulkner's work, although I do not find it much in evidence in the work of such white Southern writers as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Several underrated American novelists seem to me characteristically pre-existentialist along these lines, among them William March, John Sanford, and the Robert M. Coates of that fine and almost unknown book, Yesterday's Burdens.

Finally, for our third encouraging trend, there is a miscellaneous body of real fictions distinguishable from pseudo fictions by form, by a core of resolved action, and above all, by the presence of moral imagination. It is a quality we can identify in the brilliant short fictions of Frank O'Connor as unmistakably as in those of Hawthorne. One symptom of genuine fiction is the presence of that faintly disreputable word, "love," undisguised, rather than in the varieties of concealment noted above.

Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joyce Carey have, in their various ways, created traditions for dealing with the reality of human love, Carey a particularly virile and robust one. And in this country, we can note with pride such recent work as Peter Taylor's A Woman Of Means, Jessamyn West's The Witch Diggers, Brendan Gill's The Trouble Of One House, and the fine book just published here by a young British writer resident in France, Patrick O'Brian's The Catalans.

HJ Kaplan's The Plenipotentiaries is that amazing conception-- a rewriting of Henry James and a characteristically Jamesian situation in contemporary terms. And Jean Stafford did something similar with the Proustian tradition in Boston Adventure, before going on to create her own specialized fictional structures in The Mountain Lion and The Catherine Wheel. Nelson Algren's The Man With The Golden Arm is an equally rare bird-- a work in the line of slum naturalism, familiar from Algren's previous books, but this time somehow suffused with poetry and rich with symbolism.

These true fictions are as unmistakable when they are concerned with sin and the darker places of the human heart, as in the work of Bernanos, Mauriac, and Graham Greene, as when sin has become bad taste and the human heart is no darker than a well-kept front parlor, as in the novels of E. M. Forster, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Henry Green. I have read only separately published snatches of Saul Bellow's forthcoming The Adventures of Augie March, but those protean snatches and his two fine earlier novels suggest that it is another book to join the thin ranks of the genuine works of fiction in our time.

The relationship between the contemporary novel in English-- which seems a more viable unit than the American novel-- and the European is a complicated matter. And perhaps there are more relationships than one. The Italian novel, like the Italian film, has seemed in the last few years to have attained tremendous vitality and power.

Recently, we have been able to get a new perspective on it by the publication in America, some decades delayed, of an early novel written under Mussolini by one of the most impressive of the Italian novelists, Alberto Moravia. Published as The Time Of Indifference, it is a depressing yet oddly moving pain of despair, very unlike Moravia's later work. The Time Of Indifference opposes the melancholy, almost impotent, nostalgic values of an upper-class Italian family to those of an unattractive go-getter, the lover first of the mother and then of the daughter, while the family's son, who is not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be, articulates the book's philosophy of indifference and sinks through ineffectual gestures of revenge into total apathy.

This opposition between older humane values that can only be celebrated as dying and new efficient values that are accepted as the wave of the future, but portrayed in all their unloveliness, is a thoroughly familiar motif. It is the constant theme of all serious Soviet fiction from the marvelous stories of Isaac Babel in the 1920s, in Red Cavalry and Benya Krik, where the older values are typified by Jewish shtetl culture opposed to the new revolutionary dynamism. Through such works as Olesha's Envy, where Ivan Babichev and his crazy machine Ophelia, the symbol of all Western humane culture, refuses to be vanquished by his brother Andrei, the forward looking sausage-maker, who is himself a kind of horrible, synthetic sausage, right down to Leonov's ambiguous Road To The Ocean in the 1940s.

Seeing this drama of the old, quixotic man going down to defeat before the new, efficient man under fascism and communism, we might be tempted to call it the reaction of the novelist to a totalitarian culture. But how can we miss it in Shakespeare, with his wonderful All For Love Anthony's losing to the beardless, new, bureaucratic Octavius's, as his Falstaff is cast off by the young, dynamic Prince Hals? It is, in fact, the protest of the artist against the death and decay of the old values in any society.

It was a major Russian preoccupation long before the revolution, and was James Fenimore Cooper's theme sometime before Moravia got around to it. Hemingway's Robert Cone is as much the new man as Andrey Babichev or King Henry V. Sartoris and Snopes are Antony and Octavius for us.

Moravia's role in recent Italian fiction suggests that a backward-looking and nostalgic protest is not opposed to a literature of hope and faith so much as it is an essential precursor of it and an ambiguous ingredient within it. If we can thus learn neither hope nor despair from Europe, we can certainly not export any hardboiled ersatz substitutes for either. The cult of Hammett, Cain, and McCoy is absurd in a France already possessed of a Celine who has gone to the end of that line, and a Malraux transmuting contemporary melodrama into authentic tragedy.

Our problem, in the last analysis, is formal, not thematic. We have had writers like Rex Warner and Ruthven Todd using Kafka's tradition to write political fables, and writers like Isaac Rosenfeld and William Sansom mining it for moral or religious fables. But who have we able to write like Kafka in a concentration of myth and ritual so intense that no single level of interpretation can contain it? And the short work like The Metamorphosis is simultaneously an allegory of the artist, an appeal against the social order, and an odyssey of the human soul.

Where our fables are thin and our documentations of life are ultimately unsatisfying, the dichotomy suggests that we need a synthesis of the two separated traditions. Dostoevsky, we might note, has all the richness of observed life in Dickens plus an added moral or symbolic dimension. Moby Dick is another such work, with humane and hopeful values perhaps more congenial to our needs. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake clothe our own paltry experience with all the ancient grandeur of myth and magic.

Where such a novelist as Cousins can write in Guard Of Honor, a triumph of realistic observation, and in Castaway a little masterpiece of symbolic fantasy, we need the union of both-- the work at once large in detail and significance. All our current trends, in the last analysis, come down to this-- the plea for the wedding full of richness and ceremony of Black Iago and delicate Desdemona that John Peale Bishop described so movingly in his poem "Speaking of Poetry." This ritual marriage is the formula for a major art of the novel, as it is the formula for any great art. And we can do no more at present than hope, unworthily, for its consummation in our time.

APPLAUSE

Thank you, Mr. Hyman. Before announcing the next speaker I have been asked just now to announce that there is an emergency call for Dr. Starr, if he is in the house, please. Our next speaker has published novels, stories, plays, and is well known to you all.

He doesn't exactly have a subject this evening. He just has a speech, a talk, which is on the same general subject of the modern novel, and I imagine with a number of disagreements, which Mr. Hyman will get a chance to deal with later. Mr. Frank O'Connor.

APPLAUSE

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chairman, I don't know, really, why I am speaking here tonight. The only qualification I can offer you is rather like the qualification of certain students in the East who describe themselves as failed BA. All I can describe myself is as an ex-modern novelist. I gave up the plan a long time ago.

In those days, I used to think I'd like to be a modern novelist. And I even plotted a modern novel, an awfully nice modern novel. Instead of the usual things of the ancient classical novel, this modern novel began in the womb. And it described all the doubts and anguish of the embryo before the embryo became an individual.

And then, I gradually lost courage. By that time, Mr. William Faulkner had anticipated me. He'd written a novel in which the principal character was an idiot-- which was much better.

LAUGHTER

And before that, James Joyce had actually described the world as seen through a woman's character. But the woman's character wasn't enough for him. The woman also represented the physical body of a woman. And when you carried it a little further, she represented the Earth spinning through space.

Well, at my age, I'm too modest to attempt to compete with these two great examples. And anyway, I don't want to. I haven't the least desire to write about an idiot, but if I ever do write about an idiot, he's going to be a real idiot, and he's not going to be a symbol for a timeless world, or for the instincts, or anything else of the kind.

And as some of you know, I have a mania for writing about women, but they're always women. They never represent the Earth spinning through space at all. There, you really touch the difference between the novelist, the writer of the 19th century, the old-fashioned writer like myself, and the really up-to-date writer.

There was a famous Russian symbolist poet-- I've forgotten his name now-- but he carried on a long, and very passionate, and very unhappy love affair all through his life with a lake in Finland. And the lake didn't requite his love, a really bad case. And he grew unhappier and unhappier, and wrote more and more poems to the lake. I have no doubt that Finnish lakes are rather like that-- slightly frigid.

LAUGHTER

Now, I don't want to add to the difficulties of the summer school authorities. And I don't want to add any word of bitterness at all to the relations between our powers and Russia. But I still do think that in the matter of lovemaking, you can't beat women.

LAUGHTER

One of the difficulties I've been faced with tonight in listening to Mr. Hyman's address is that I have been conditioned. For the second time, the summer school authorities have asked me back. And I find that after five or six weeks, what began as a mere assumption, what began as the sort of idea you throw out to a friend, becomes fact.

I suppose it simply is the fact that one can't be almighty God for five days of the week and an ordinary human being for the other two days. But one is frightfully shocked, I notice, after a spell of teaching by error. And I'm afraid instead of the nice, cheerful discussion that I should normally have had with Mr. Hyman, I just feel that Mr Hyman has fallen into error.

LAUGHTER

Now, another difficulty about teaching is that one repeats oneself. And I can only apologize to any students of mine who are here tonight, and who hear me saying the same things over and over again. I just can't stop them. Like the old lady who went to confession and confessed the one passionate sin of her youth, I like talking about it.

LAUGHTER

Now, I feel that I've seen two periods of literary taste, and I'm just on the edge of seeing a third. I saw the first by accident because I grew up in an Irish provincial town. And in that Irish provincial town, we didn't have much in the way of modern literature.

And I've met other Irishmen who have grown up in the same way, and who grew up feeling that the 19th century novel was a contemporary novel. I used to have one old friend who said to another old friend of mine, "It's no use talking to me about literature. To me, literature means three names, all of them Russian." And when I first heard the story, what really interested me was that I didn't laugh for a split second. What really flashed through my mind was, which three?

LAUGHTER

So I grew up feeling that the 19th century novel was the novel, and there wasn't any other sort of art possible. And that 19th century novel, I still think, was the greatest art since the Greek theater, the greatest popular art, the only one which compares, for instance, with the Elizabethan theater. It was an art of the whole people, an art in which there was a correspondence between the writer and his audience.

Kuprin, the Russian short-story writer, has a wonderful short story, which moved me terribly when I read it first of all, describes an old deacon of the Orthodox Church who was given instructions to prepare to chant in an excommunication service against somebody whose name he's never heard of. And the deacon is a bass. And like all basses, he's just crazy with vanity, and he's delighted with the chance.

And he goes away and he practices the anathema service with great enthusiasm. And then gradually, the name of the man the service is being held against comes into his head. It's Tolstoy.

And he remembers that once upon a time, he read a book by Tolstoy called The Cossacks. And then scenes from The Cossacks begin to come back into his head. And finally, at a great moment of the service, when he's got to burst into these colossal curses of the Orthodox and the Catholic Church, he bursts instead into an exultant Mnogaja leta ad multos annos.

And that was a story that was understood by the audience that read it because they felt about Tolstoy exactly as Kuprin felt about him, exactly as the deacon felt about him. Again, a friend of mine in Ireland describes an old woman who he knew who, every night, added to her night prayers a special prayer for Charles Dickens. And it's no use telling me that that's not criticism, but I know perfectly well it's not criticism and I don't give a damn.

I maintain that that describes the 19th century novel to you. All I will say is that there isn't a parish priest in the world who wouldn't be delighted to join in an excommunication service against any modern novelist.

LAUGHTER

And I doubt very much if there is an old woman in the world who adds a prayer for Mr. Faulkner to her night prayers.

LAUGHTER

Now, that was the 19th century novel. And there's no question at all about where the 19th century novel came from. The 19th century novel was the great art of the middle classes, who'd been released by the French Revolution from their subjection to the aristocracy, and were at last doing what they'd always wanted to do, what they tried to do in Elizabethan times, what they did in the Elizabethan middle class plays.

And these plays are obscured for us today by the fact that Shakespeare's genius just wiped them out. But there they were, a whole art in themselves. Many of them have disappeared, and it's only from the work of somebody like Professor Sisson that we realize what they were really like-- that they all contained libel actions. In fact, they were all dealing with a man around the corner and with the contemporary scandal because they all became subjects for legal actions.

And as a result, professor Sisson has been able to resurrect plays which otherwise would have disappeared from the world, have disappeared from the world so far as their texts go. The next time the middle classes really got to work was in the Netherlands. And there, you get a 19th century novel expressed as Dutch painting. And you get all the standards of the middle classes expressed in Dutch painting, with the exception of the moral standards, which the novel adds to middle class art.

All you've got to do is look at a Dutch interior to realize what the 19th century novel was going to be when it came. First of all, the old fanciful conception, the old genealogical conception, had been wiped out. And in its place, you got something which we can vaguely call realism. And everybody today tells me you can't define realism.

And I don't mind whether you can define realism or not, it's there in Dutch painting. And it's there in the 19th century novel. And in the Dutch paintings, you get the poetry of everyday life expressed for the first time in the history of the human race.

And when you come to the 19th century novel, that is really what you get. It was only today that a friend of mine referred me to an essay which I've never read, and which I'm quoting to you on trust, an essay by, of all people, the Marquis de Sade, in which he defines what the 19th century novel is going to be. And in this essay, he says, the novel-- as soon as the novelists have learned to deal with the new reading public-- will deal with the differences between professions.

It will deal with the differences between races. It will educate the new middle class about what ordinary life is like. And the amazing thing is that the Marquis de Sade never listened to his own advice.

There's a complete change in the values established by the 19th century novel. Instead of honor, the feudal conception, you get the conception of honesty. Trollope can write a masterpiece about an old clergyman who can't explain what he's done with a check for 25 pounds-- $75. And a whole novel is built upon this theme.

And for the first time, again, you feel that certain subjects are being dealt with as they should be dealt with. When I read Tolstoy's description of Sebastopol, I feel that war, for the first time in the history of the human race, is being dealt with, with the gravity that it demands.

And this thing was not confined to the novelists. It was part of the whole middle class conception of life. Because again, I'm repeating myself, and I'm quite prepared to go on repeating myself-- at the other side of the lines from Tolstoy, there was a young English woman called Florence Nightingale. And Florence Nightingale was trying to prove to the English government that women could make nurses.

And she describes in her journals how these English boys who were dying of exposure and starvation outside Scutari, were being brought down to her. And she was haunted by the face of these English boys. And in her journals, she uses phrases like this-- "Oh, my poor men, I have been a bad mother to you. To go away and leave you in your Crimean graves. 76% in eight regiments in six months."

And there you have the whole middle class conception of life which is also expressed in Sebastopol. For the first time, you've got that Shakespearean cry of emotion-- "My poor men, I have been a bad mother to you." But it's also expressed in percentages.

For the first time, you get statistical diagnosis. And it's been practiced by a woman.

And then, we move to the modern novel, and we find the whole picture is entirely different. I moved in this way simply because I lived in a provincial town, and nobody had told me that there was any gap. Nobody had told me that a classical novel had ended in 1880, and had begun again in 1910, with people like Forster, and Gide and Proust, and Joyce, and Lawrence. But it had, and it was an entirely different thing.

To begin with, in Joyce's work, when I read it-- and I admired it extravagantly, because it was dealing with the sort of life I knew-- you got a type of realism which I didn't understand. And I didn't understand it until I turned to the work of Flaubert. And I realized that it wasn't realism-- it was naturalism.

It was the man standing outside the situation he was describing, saying, "this has got nothing at all to do with me." In the realistic novel, the writer said, I'm just a man like these men. And I feel with them. And I don't mind weeping over them, and I don't mind laughing at them.

But Flaubert said, you can't get involved in these things. And Joyce takes it up. And in stories like the stories in Dubliners, you get something which was entirely new to me-- you get naturalism, as opposed to realism. And after a time, it began to weary me enormously.

As well as that, you get another thing in Dubliners-- which goes on through Portrait, and goes on through all Joyce's work, and goes on through the whole of modern literature, and that is the use of metaphor. You realize when you read a story like "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," or "The Dead," that the characters that Joyce is describing are not free. They are characters who are representing something else, and every action they perform, and every word they say is related to something else, which is a symbol, which is a metaphor.

For instance, in "The Dead," not one single sentence is uttered which is not related to Joyce's idea of death. And that, again, was new to me. You get the same thing in The Portrait, except that it grows in complexity all the way through. And finally, you get it in Ulysses.

In Ulysses, you get a character, Mr. Bloom, who is also the hero of The Odyssey. His wife at one time is Calypso, at another time, she's Penelope.

And the unfortunate man whose funeral he's attending, a gentleman called Dignam, happens to be somebody called El Pinar in The Odyssey. And as El Pinar is a Semitic word which means drunk. Mr. Dignam has to be too fond of drink. That's what really kills him, eventually.

There, you get something, again, entirely new in fiction. You get the character controlled from the word, "go." Mr. Bloom just is not allowed to say or do anything which is not relevant to the theme.

I have to apologize for introducing all the scurrilous details, but today I found myself having to explain to my class why it is that Mr. Bloom, after breakfast, having occasion to go apart, shall we say, has the choice between going upstairs and going out to the yard. And the subject of the chapter is metempsychosis-- Mr. Bloom, in fact, is Ulysses, and he's following out the program of Ulysses in The Odyssey.

Now, his freedom of action is considerably restricted, because Joyce is using the ordinary processes of life-- the growth of grass, crops, and so on, cattle feeding on them, the human beings finally feeding on the cattle, and the byproducts being returned to the Earth, and coming up again as grass-- he's using this as an analogy to illustrate the process of metempsychosis. Consequently, Mr. Bloom cannot go upstairs.

The one thing a metaphor cannot do is let its author down. And the Almighty, at least, gave us two choices, but Joyce only gives us one. And all I can say is that I have no respect at all for a character who allows himself to be dictated to in this way, particularly in such intimate matters by an author.

And of course, finally, in Finnegans Wake, you reach the position where what is in the unconscious in Ulysses just comes on top-- everything is a metaphor. Humanity, itself, is a metaphor. Every movement we make is a metaphor. It's all dictated, it's all determined-- we've got nothing at all to say to it.

Then, I turn to Proust who is one of my earliest heroes, and I think will be until the day I die, and I notice again peculiar things which I don't notice in the classical novel. For instance, in Du côté de chez Swann you get a character called Swann who is in love with a woman called Odette. And that love story represents the pattern of all the love episodes through Proust. Every single love episode is based on that.

And it describes the pattern is the pattern of a very rich, and a very cultured man, who falls in love with a woman definitely of the lower classes, who is completely uneducated, and who is entirely venal. And the theme that Proust is hammering home in every single one of these love stories is that, in effect, when we fall in love with a woman, we create the woman.

There is no woman there. We create her. We fall out of love with her, she ceases to exist.

And it's only after I had read Proust very carefully that I began to discover that this affected everything that Proust wrote. That in fact, the whole theory of Proust's work depends upon this one idea that in love, there is no reciprocity. Once you fall in love, you fall in love with an idea in your own mind, not with something in the external world.

Accordingly, you get Proust laying down the law about it-- you get him saying that nothing but inaccurate observation will permit you to say that there is any truth in an object. All truth is in the mind.

Now, I can make no distinction between what Joyce is saying and what Proust is saying. What they are saying is that the old objective world of the classical novel doesn't exist. There is nothing outside me as Coquelin and Yeats's last great play says, "I make the truth."

And what I really want to know is, how does that differ from the statements of people like Mussolini and Hitler? Don't they say, "I make the truth?" What else is this, except literary fascism?

And there, you come back to the intellectual background of the modern novel. You come back to the fact that, behind all this work, there is an intellectual background, which is entirely subjective.

You come back to a psychological background-- of Freud and Jung-- which simply says, a certain pattern has been created for our lives, and we follow that pattern out. We don't control it-- it goes on in spite of us.

What Proust is really saying is what Bergson says-- there, you get a subjective philosophy, which, in fact, refuses to distinguish between the subject and the object. Refuses to distinguish between me and the external world.

Its part is one of these anti-rational philosophies which have been springing up all the time during the past 50 years. And as well as that, particularly in Joyce, particularly in Ulysses, and in Finnegans Wake, you get this subjective conception of history which begins with Flinders Petrie, and goes on through Spengler, and ends up in our own time with Toynbee, which says, that history is merely a pattern and we've got to fall into the pattern. We can't affect the pattern. There it is, dictated for us. And that is precisely what Joyce is saying, and precisely what the other writers are saying.

Now, all that comes from, very curiously, the only critic I know who has traced this-- is a modern French novelist, whom I admire enormously, Marcel Ayme. And Marcel Ayme has written a brilliant book called, Le Confort Intellectual-- just enjoying yourself intellectually, if you like, in which he attacks the whole conception of modern literature, and maintains that modern literature has been going wrong since Baudelaire. And makes an awfully good case for it.

The only way in which Ayme goes wrong is that he doesn't realize that Baudelaire is picking up something else which goes back to the romantic revival-- that is going back to Byronism, to sadism, to precisely what the Marquis de Sade was doing. That this thing ran underground right through the 19th century. That it came up in two people-- Baudelaire in poetry, and Flaubert in prose.

In Flaubert, you get the naturalistic novel-- the novel which intends to be realistic, but all the time at its side, you get these wildly romantic writing. Things like the Temptation of Saint Anthony and Salammbo, in which all the perversions dealt with by Sade at last come to light.

These continue along until 1880, the death of the classical novel. Mario Praz has dealt with this very brilliantly and very wickedly in his book, Romantic Agony. The interesting thing is that I've been saying for a great many years, since the classical novel died in 1880, and Mario Praz says, the extraordinary thing is, the full revival, a full romantic revival only comes with the year 1880. When the classical novel dies, the romantic revival books start coming out, you get Wilde, and all the rest of it.

And in fact, what has happened, as far as I can see it, is that this literature of the romantic revival, approved by Freud, approved by Spengler, approved by Bergson, has become modern literature. That is the modern novel-- it is romantic revival literature with all the characteristics of the romantic revival about it.

The unnatural triangle that you find in Swan, Odette and INAUDIBLE , and in Bloom and Blazes Boylan, and Marion Bloom, that you find all over the work of Lawrence, that you find in the work of Mr. Faulkner, Popeye's relationship with Temple Drake, that you find in Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises-- it is the old romantic sadistic conception.

Now, I have very little time left, and all I want to say is, as I told you before, I found myself living through two periods of literary taste, and I have a feeling that I'm going to live to see the beginning of a third. Already all over Europe, I think there is a change, that is a difference in attitude, and it's very easy to see where that difference in attitude comes from.

When you read Marcel Ayme's book on Le Confort Intellectual, you see that the thing that really impressed him was the horrors of the liberation-- the tens of thousands of Frenchmen who were massacred all over the place on no ground whatever, for no reason whatever. You get this fantasy of malice expressing itself.

And as well as that, on the other hand, as he says, when the Allied troops burst into the concentration camps, what they found before them was a poem by Baudelaire. And it's Buchenwald, and Belsen, and the horrors of the liberation through Europe-- which I believe have wakened up the younger writers, have made them realize that you can't any longer live in a subject of world. That somehow or other, you've got to face the fact that objective reality exists, and you've got to come to terms with it.

I believe there are signs of that in the work of Marcel Ayme, who was a much finer novelist than he's given credit for being. In the work of my friend, C. P. Snow. In the work of Joyce Kerry in England. And in particular, in the work of some followers of C. P. Snow, who believes as he does, that this period is over and done with, that you can never go back to what we call the modern novel.

And I don't know what the answers are to the questions I've been raising tonight. All through history, you get this conflict between the inner man and the outer man, between the thing you feel to be true and the truth which is outside you.

And the only light I've got on the subject is in that passage in the Gospels, which I keep on quoting whenever I'm asked about it, the passage in which Christ is asked by the doctor of the laws, which is the most important of the commandments. And Christ knew that if he said the first commandment, he was admitting that reality was subjective. If he said, the second commandment, he was saying that reality was objective.

He simply quotes the first two commandments and says, there is no commandment more important than these. I've always felt that what he meant by that was reality is neither within us nor without us-- it's both within us and without us. And it's inapprehensible, except in moments when the two strike together, when they strike a spark from one another, and there is no truth more important than that.

APPLAUSE

I suggest that before going ahead with the commentary on these talks and discussion of them, everyone feel he has the right for about 40 seconds to stand up and stretch, it seems to me.

You are listening to the Harvard Summer School conference on the contemporary novel, coming to you from Sanders Theater at Harvard, over WGBH Symphony Hall in Boston. We have heard the first two formal speeches of the evening-- the only actual formal speaking done by Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer and former director of the Abbey Theater in London-- in Dublin, that is-- and Stanley E. Hyman, who was our first speaker, critic and Professor of English literature at Bennington College.

I think we'd better get on with the business of the evening.

The commentator on these speeches is himself a novelist and a critic, and needs no further introduction-- Mr. Anthony West.

APPLAUSE

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chairman, after the banquet and the washing up, the first thing that really struck me in Mr. Hyman's speech was the idea of myth and ritual as a basis for art and the novel. It made me think of William Morris and the sad occasion in pre-Raphaelite history when Mr. William Morris was reading aloud from one of his pseudo-Norse sagas, with a strong mythological basis, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Morris had the experience, which many people have had when reading aloud, that the other mind in the room slowly closed down and shut itself off. And a silence fell, and ultimately Rossetti became aware of it. And he broke it with an apology, which was at the same time a piece of criticism.

He said, I find it awfully difficult to take a real interest in a man whose brother is a dragon. This is the fundamental basis of failure in any art form which relies on myth in a literate society-- opinions are various, the myth is not universally acceptable, and the conditions break down.

We have a great many relics of myth-based cultures, such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, which we know how they were produced. We know the conditions which gave them life. There was a culture with a unified field. The mythology was common property. The basis of the epic was common property. The audience knew every part of it through constant repetition.

The Iliad, as we know it, took its form over a process of about 600 years, annual and biennial and seven-year festivals, which the audiences came together to hear poets give this thing tiny variations in form. The metrical, metaphoric character, but the basis of structure remained the same.

I don't believe in our society, which cannot agree on any single myth, that we can support, for any period, this constant repetition that a myth involves. The individual's search for his identity, if we reduce it to a pattern of an individual, or with specific characters, characteristics, in search of fulfillment of a specific kind, it opens up a vista of intolerable monotony before us that David Copperfield-- if we accept our type individual as David Copperfield, that every young man at the crisis of his life, which Dickens then was, when he was achieving his personality, but was not quite satisfied with its effect on the outside world, he rewrote his youth.

If we had every young man who reached that stage of development giving us the same story, with his little variation of personal experience, the novel would become a torment to us. The prospects of the novel, in any case, are, I think, rather tormenting, we look at them with considerable fear and horror. We have had about 250 years of it, and it may go on like Chinese poetry. We may have novels going on in a literate society for another 600 or 700 years.

And I very much hope that, if I'm alive during that 600 or 700 years, it won't have a myth basis. Because all the variousness, the richness, and the fluidity of form and content which it enjoys will inevitably be expelled.

I think the idea of a blend of naturalism and myth, which I think Mr. Hyman suggests would keep it alive, that the constant injection of personal experience into a myth form would give it a variety, is a fallacy. We have had various art forms in which myth and realism have tried to coexist, and they had a very uneasy time of it.

The most obvious example, I think, that sort of puts the thing in the simplest form is to take painting-- where we have, in a very short period, the movement from icon to a sort of realism myth of things like the Matthias Grunewald altarpiece, to Manet's picture of the dead Christ. And it isn't clear that realism has destroyed the value of the symbols.

If you look at a Byzantine icon, you see concepts, you see ideas given a very formal pattern, which are universally valid. You're not dealing with anything particular or special, you are dealing with the cosmology, with the ideas of the Christian church in a compact form, which are available instantly to every Christian who sees them.

When you get to the Grunewald altarpiece, you have got beyond the universal application of the symbols-- you are faced with an instant, you are faced with a man at a particular phase of his life, as sufferings. The body has just died, it's about to begin to corrupt. The thorns are there, which will presently fall away-- they're material objects trapped in an instant of time. And they have already acquired the transitory value of an instant, and they have moved away from the permanent moment of the valid symbol.

When you finally come down to the Manet picture, it's a purely formal exercise with a cadaver from a mortuary. And the instant has passed-- all significance is drained away. And you wonder why Manet painted it. There is no focus of vitality or life on the picture at all.

I think that this uneasy marriage of naturalism and myth is an impossibility. Then we went on-- Mr. Hyman went on to talk of the pseudo-novel, in very severe forms, the novel which was a disguised report. And I was rather astonished that he spoke with such severity of this form, which seems to me an extremely old one.

Benjamin Constant beginning with a modern novel with that extraordinary exercise, the psychological novel of the relations of two people, which doesn't change throughout the book, but which is a revelation of two complete personalities. We know how autobiographical it is-- it's near a picture-- it's a picture as near to a picture of himself as he can paint, and the woman is as near to a portrait of the woman he knew and was longtime associated with as he could possibly make it.

At a very high level, it's reportage. And the greatest novelist of all, I think, the unchallenged master of the realistic 19th century novel, created an enormous, complete world, and an enormous population to inhabit it, Balzac-- as we know, his method was to report as closely as possible on the reality under his observation.

The particular example, I think, which is almost like a shorthand report of evidence, is the Distinguished Provincial in Paris-- we know that Balzac was the confidant of George Sand who confided every detail of her relationship with Jules Sandeau, and the relationship went straight into the book. And it is there, like a series of instantaneous photographs. The imagination has worked on the fact, and produced something which I don't think it's possible to call anything but magnificent.

And I had an uneasy feeling, too, when I was hearing Mr. Hyman talk of the tendency of writers to drop into self-parody as something new. I think we have known for a long time that people get old, and writers get old like everybody else. And most writers, after they are 40 or 45, cease to receive new material, and they are dredging at a reserve-- impression and a backlog of experience-- which is all they're going to have.

And as they get tired, and their control of their method softens off, they produce things which are weaker versions of what they have already written. Yesterday, we had Sinclair Lewis very sadly doing that in public. And the day before yesterday, we had Conrad at the end of his life producing The Rover. I don't think it's possible to say that the exhaustion of writers and their lapse into self-parody is a new thing at all.

The obsession with homosexuality, which Mr. Hyman touched on, seems to me to be a more important thing for the novel than he allowed it to be. I don't think it's a matter of individual attitudes, really, it comes from the very nature of the novel-- which Mr. O'Connor said was the art form of the middle class.

The point about the homosexual, the accepted point, is that he's sick-- mentally sick. He's out of control. And he's not responsible. He is a man who has gotten himself into a category, and he's not really an effective free agent.

The dramas, the novel, in which our novelists involve such people, are dramas of trapped people. I think the clue is in this. Balzac's world, which is one in which Rastignac can, in all seriousness, at the most depressing and shattering moment of his life, can go apart to a hill overlooking Paris, and challenge society inwardly.

He swears that he will master Paris and he will master all that Paris stands for. In fact, he is a free-- an entirely free man, who is going to make his own terms with destiny. And the century which produced Balzac, produced Rastignac, was firmly of the opinion that what was unsatisfactory about the world could be, by the use of reason, the concerted effort of reasonable men, could be very much improved. And that when you got away from the mass category of reasonable men down to individuals, that they could make their terms with fate, subtle what they like.

The great thing which has happened to the middle class senses a loss of courage and a loss of faith as a group in that idea. And I think that is symbolized by the movement of the novel. The modern novel's type figure, which is not anything like Rastignac. It's Kafka's nameless individual who is trapped in a machine that he can't understand. And he's ultimately killed for no reason that he can arrive at, like a dog.

You get this type figure occurring at every level, from best sellers down, or up, whichever you like to put it, to the most Avant Garde literature. James Jones' Trumpeter is the individual ground down by a social force, by the army, by the brutality of society and having an instrument like the army.

And at a very different level, the core of Hemingway is more explicitly, more consciously, saying the same thing-- the end of To Have and To Have Not is the moral that the dying Henry Morgan forces out with his life blood as he lies dying, is to say, a man alone hasn't got a chance.

This is an absolutely unthinkable statement 60 years ago, or 90 years ago, for people to take seriously. They believed that a man alone was responsible for himself. He was not in a hopeless position doomed to failure.

The basis of all of Hemingway's thought is that a man alone is doomed to failure. The only thing worth being is a man of action with a hunter's honor, and that that is something which society has no place for.

It's the same doctrine behind Intruder in the Dust-- really the final scene when the man walks through the town with his pride, is a scene of tragic import. The man is alone in a town which knows none of his values. There's that lament at the end of it for the car-owning, dishonorable, money-grubbing society, in which the hero, in his hour of triumph, is entirely meaningless.

You remember Edmund Wilson's wonderful essay about Hemingway, which called him the gauge of morale, like the morale is out of the middle class explicitly in his essay.

It seemed to me, too, that Mr. Hyman was a great deal less than just to Forster, in who return he said that in Forster, sin had become a matter of bad taste. I think there is a level of-- impressive level of weakness about Forster's work, but I think that's a technical impression because of the technique he adopted-- the tea-tabling technique, the description of shocking events, of violent events, in terms which you could do it over a tea tray with lace cloth on it, silver cups, and so on. The great Edwardian English technique of adopting as your standard of expression the conversation of a well-bred man.

I think that does great injustice to his content. The sin, in Forster's work, is of not speaking from the heart in matters of importance, in human relations. It's in a way, it's the well-bred declaration of the great theme in Lawrence's work-- the crime against life, which is the breach of the flow of complete honesty between honest people.

And Forster's work is all about a conflict between the children of warmth and light, who are candid and absolutely ruthless in their declaration of themselves, and the children of darkness, who are cold-hearted and hypocritical. And The Passage to India, which seems to be about the troubles of a rather ineffectual man, is-- I think it has the same intention as Shaw's Heartbreak House, and it's a much more dignified tragedy.

It's an expression of the failure to bridge a gap that could have been bridged by unfrozen and unfrightened hearts. And it's really the tragedy of the British failure in India, in individual terms, I think is a very magnificent novel.

I must say that I found it very hard to take the expressions of admiration for Kafka's Metamorphosis, which does seem to me, in essence, what is wrong with a large number of modern novels. It is a private view of a private obsession. And I think you can read into it almost anything you like, because it has no definition and no formal relation to any accepted body of thought.

It doesn't spring from any tradition. It's an individual cantrip-- a freak. And it has a sort of reputation at the moment, I think, is an entirely delusive one, because by having neither form nor substance, it enables anyone who reads it to write their own poetry, their commentary becomes the work. You import your own feelings into it and make it something.

By the standards of the 19th century, what would a reasonable man think of this story? The story of the boy who imagines that he is turning into a beetle, and who is worried because he smells like a cockroach, and so on? So this is silly stuff. And I think that basically is what it is.

I think The Trial is a great deal less silly. But I think there, again, we have a particular thing, a very private impression, which is expressed in such a manner that you can pin anything to it. Kafka was-- who existed on the fringe of the Austrian empire. It was the most cumbersome and the most corrupt bureaucracy that the world has ever seen, and it governed the most brilliant and sharp-witted group of people who exist anywhere in the world-- the people who live in the trouble corridor which is now behind the Iron Curtain. People who, by centuries of living under oppressions of various kind, have developed an extraordinary razor-like satirical technique and a wit entirely of their own.

And I believe that Kafka's Trial is a witty parody of Austrian life as it was lived by a very brilliant Jew who was in a Czech, and had no place in any particular life or society, and was under the shadow of this great, cumbersome, creaking machine. It is a symbolic treatment of that situation.

I don't believe it applies to the conscience, and I don't believe it has any of the depth, which nearly 50 years of arduous work have given-- or 30 years of arduous critical work-- have enriched it with. We have had a great many exciting feelings about it. We have pinned them to it.

I think some of our critical results are perfectly fascinating. I think the Kafka thing, when you look at it, and go really through it, you find that it's a most brilliant piece of writing. Nobody has described action so well. Known has described impressions of action by somebody going through it so well.

There's the actual use of language is, I think, extraordinarily impressive. And nobody who wants to write can do better than read Kafka, just for the sake of seeing how when the reader is told what happens. But I think that is where it ends.

I feel very reluctant to say anything about what Mr. O'Connor said in his lament for the 19th century novel. One hears these magnificent cries over grave mounds, and one throws one's ash on the thing and melts away with the rest of the crowd and leaves it at that.

But even so, I think Mr. O'Connor's dead man is, while rusted, he shows signs of life all the time to me. I think a few years back, we had Guard of Honor, which is a middlebrow novel-- it's not a work of enormous sensitivity, and it's not a work of very fresh ideas.

But it is a picture of that air base down in Florida, and particularly MacDill Field, and the set of circumstances, it's rich in characters, and incident follows incident. It's extraordinarily convincing, and has color and movement. And I must say, it seems to be the 19th century novel at the old stand working just about as well as it can work.

If the man had also been a great genius, and he'd had a great view of society, if he could have just given it a little more, we would have had something very exciting indeed.

And I think we have today a 19th century novelist who is full of vigor and life, who has a view of a particular social question, which is just as moving. He has strong moral feelings about it, he's writing just like Dickens about it. That is, the author of the Invisible Man.

I don't think when you read that, when you read the extraordinarily vivid actual descriptions of the man eating the hot yams by the street stand, the riot in Harlem, and so on, this is the Dickensian technique, and it is alive and it's working. And I don't see any reason why it shouldn't go on working.

I feel as sure as anything that, as long as we have people with moral indignation, and with large-- I might say rather loosely buttoned imaginations-- we'll go on getting those great, expansive, joyful, and moving vehicles.

The thing that we have is a society which has a great many facets. It is not the sort of unitary society which can produce a myth. It's unthinkable that we should now have a myth that should be acceptable to every single element in our community.

But it is a community which is conscious all the time moral issues. We open our newspapers and moral issues bark at us. And when we live our lives, we are rubbing our noses against them all the time. That is the life of the 19th century novel, and it is there.

I would say that the obscurantist novel, the novel of private impression, the novel which demands that you learn a new language, like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, seems to me to have less and less possibility. Joyce was-- it's almost impossible to understand Ulysses unless you were at school with Joyce in Dublin.

I have talked over various passages with a man who was at school with him in Dublin, and page after page, it was as if one was looking through an old fashioned camera with the ground glass panel at the back. And you turned the screw, and the thing came up in focus.

It seems to me to make an impossible demand on the reader, and an impossible demand really on the critical apparatus. Because if the number of people who are preparing keys for Ulysses, and so on, is as great as ever, and we're still far from attaining anything like complete understanding of it. You really have to become Joyce's perceptive mechanism to understand it at all.

People are resolutely as ever writing their private impression novels, but I think the phase of leisure, intellectual curiosity, which briefly existed in the '20s, has passed. There will be times again when we have periods of intellectual excitement, combined with the sort of material ease which will produce that sort of thing. It's inevitable-- it should be so. There have always been such episodes in the past, and there will be again. But I don't think it's any immediate trend in the novel is like to spring out of that.

I was rather impressed by what Mr. O'Connor said about Proust's annihilation of the external world-- his belief that his demand that you submit entirely to his impression. I think that's a little unjust to Proust. This, to base all this on the idea of the love which is reflected in some of the main personal relationships.

As a matter of fact, the images of a debt, which exist in the minds of her immediate admirers, are contrasted with images which are in the eye of an external being. The objective world does exist.

I only recall at this moment one incident where it's perfectly plain that that does happen-- a scene on the Champs Elysees, when the chestnut trees are in bloom. And it is towards noon, and all the smart Parisians are in their barouches and the carriages, and the men riding by. The two oldest gentlemen, passing under the chestnuts in their gray top hats-- a debt crisis carriage comes by.

And one old gentleman strokes his mustache and nudges the other and said, that's a debt crisis. I had her the night McMahon's government fell. It seems to me quite clear that a debt is visible to other eyes, and those are Swann's obsessions of what these old gentlemen are looking at her from somewhere quite outside that thing.

It seems to me that the great thing in Proust, which gives the book its life and vitality, is that it's not a monatic view of life, but I'd say it's a work in which there's a constant flow to and from the illusions of the characters and a report of the characters as they actually exist. It's a much richer thing, I think, than Mr. O'Connor allows it to be.

I don't think that there's any possibility of summing up these two extremely diffused-- these extremely opposed and unrelated views.

LAUGHTER

I'm sorry, I do this extremely badly. But it does seem to me that while you have such a wide view of what the novel is, what its prospects are, you come down ultimately to the fact that it is a remarkable form. It's like the mind of the middle class-- it has no particular shape, no particular form. It's open to new ideas, it's closed to any rules.

The novel is something infinitely flexible. It has no limitations of subject. All of life can be crammed into it. It allows people to preach, it allows people to report objectively, it allows people to give photographic pictures, allows people to give abstract interpretations. In all, it is a thing which may take any pattern as the society changes.

At the moment, it is depressed and unoptimistic, because the prevailing view of life, and the class which produces it, is unoptimistic and timid. I think we may be in for one of those periods, like the Baroque period in painting, when everybody is working very hard producing contorted brown pictures, which are not much fun. Painting is asleep for a time.

That period, it can come alive any minute.

APPLAUSE

Thank you, Mr. West. The program, I think, for the rest of the evening should be that first of all, we give the speakers a chance to speak to Mr. West's points. And then, people here on the panel discuss everyone-- discuss anything he wants to. And then we will have questions from the audience if there is time.

Should this evening-- the panel take up most of the time and there not be an opportunity for many questions from the audience, I think you might save them up. The whole program has a certain unity, at least of subject, and on Wednesday evening, there will perhaps be more time for questions from the audience. And some of your questions that you might want to raise this evening may be answered a little later this evening or tomorrow.

I'd like first of all to ask Mr. Hyman to use-- just let's all stay right here at the table-- to use that microphone, which I assume is alive, and speak to Mr. West's points.

I don't have much to say to Mr. West's points, in that I think he summarized and commented on what I had to say fairly, with perhaps one small reservation-- that his feeling that I had somehow underrated E. M. Forster by saying that his work dealt with the vocabulary of bad taste rather than the vocabulary of sin, in writers like Graham Greene, I think is unwarranted.

I was suggesting, and would argue, I think, that these are both major traditions in the serious and worthwhile novel. And if Graham Greene, and those like him, sees things in terms of sin, and Forster does not, I surely wouldn't submit that as a weakness in Forster. I would also note in that account that when I said that Foster's picture of the human heart was no darker than a well-kept front parlor, that of course, a well-kept front parlor is very dark.

Other than that, I suppose the big issue is Kafka, which I think is too much to bring up as a discussion now. And all you can fairly say is that Mr. West apparently doesn't share my feelings for Kafka. I refuse to give them up for that reason, and will, left with what I imagine all of you are exercised with, too, which is simply a difference in taste and opinion. And that's all.

All right, Mr. O'Connor?

Well, I'm in the--

Mr. O'Connor, would you move the--

I'm in the unfortunate position that I can't quarrel with anybody, either. I'd love to do it. The nearest thing I can get to a quarrel is with Mr. West on the subject of Kafka. I entirely agree that this thing needs discussion, whether we have time to discuss it or not is another matter.

The point is The Trial, Kafka's Trial has nothing at all to do with life under the Austro-Hungarian empire.

LAUGHTER

Kafka's two great novels, The Castle and The Trial are the modern equivalent of The Pilgrim's Progress-- they're allegories. And they're allegories written in Freudian terms. I don't particularly like Freud, and I don't particularly admire this as a technique, but there it is, on they're two wonderful books. And we ought to realize that they are dealing with man's destiny. And just man in face of eternity.

And beyond that, I haven't much to quarrel with. I think I gathered a reference to Mr. James Gould Cozzens novel, after which I picked up the words joyful, expansive, moving. Was I dreaming?

Now, as well as that, Mr. West thinks I've exaggerated the subjective element in Proust's work. Actually, I minimized it all along the line of Proust's theory that the reality is in the subject, not in the object, is derived from the Bergsonian philosophy. And you get it all over the book.

And he devotes a whole novel, Le Temps Retrouve, to proving that a objective reality doesn't exist. The only reality which is apprehensive is whatever happens to remain in the unconscious mind after an event has occurred, which is, in itself, inapprehensible and indescribable.

I don't know that there's very much one can say about this question. But the general attack on Bergson is on that level, that he makes no distinction between the subject and the object. And it's not very easy to say with Proust whether he really says, there is an objective reality or not. You can quote occasional passages from Proust which seemed to suggest that he admitted the existence of a reality, though he maintained you could make no statement of value about it.

On the other hand, you can quote innumerable passages from Proust which go to show that there is no reality in the object, whatever.