We had expected that one of the speakers last night would be Miss Katherine Anne Porter. She, however, has been ill. We have been expecting day-by-day, as have she and her physician, that she would be well enough to come right up until this afternoon when an emissary from the conference called at her request and prepared to help her get started from New York-- from Washington here. But she-- though she was willing to come and have the show go on, in true tradition of the theater, our agent there thought that was too much of a hardship for her, that she still with a fever should not be subjected to the trip.

The program tomorrow night will continue as announced last night. One of the speakers will be Miss Hilda Livingston, who represents the New American Library which publishes successfully large numbers of paperback books. The other speaker will be Mr. William Sloane, editorial vice-president of Funk & Wagnalls, who has had great experience in the publication of I don't know what column, but non-paperback books.

This will be followed by, I trust, a rousing panel discussion by all the members of the panel, this being a chance for authors to argue over some of the matters that the publishers will bring up. One of the themes I know in advance from talking to the speakers will be the problem of just what does money have to do with what the contemporary novel is? And this, of course, has always been a problem and is one now, and has many ramifications at the moment.

And the editorial policy, whether or not it's free-- as free to choose and follow various art forms as it used to be-- will be the subject at that point. Tonight, the two talks are, again, by authors-- novelists-- as last evening, and the subjects we will deal with later.

I want to take the time of the conference this evening for about five or six minutes to summarize what went on last evening, because the panel discussion after the two speeches and after the commentary by Professor Frohock on the two speeches will probably include some of the matters brought up last night and not fully dealt with. Mr. Hyman, speaking last evening on some trends in the novel, pointed out three unattractive trends.

First, what he calls self-parody, finding certain writers-- Hemingway, Faulkner, and others-- writing now in their what he presented as their later days writing rehashes of earlier works and doing an inferior job. The second unattractive trend he noticed was what he called the disguises of love, taking the title from a novel by Robie Macaulay, in which he dealt with the problem of heterosexual-- homosexual love being presented as heterosexual love. The third trend which he found unattractive was what he called pseudo fictions, the kind of thing the recent novel-- essentially, The Life of Scott Fitzgerald and Mr. Hershey's The Wall and such works of that sort.

Among the hopeful trends Mr. Hyman noted was a tendency for fiction to begin to merge naturalism with myth and ritual, and the second thing that he felt was an attractive trend and cause for hope was more concentration on the experience of the individual as actor, not just as spectator, and as a real participant in things. And third-- among the third attractive trend that he sees is more interest in form-- more effective interest in form-- and coupled with this, what he called "moral imagination."

In commenting on Mr. Hyman's speech, Mr. West had a great many things to say, and I will only touch on these things. And this is my impression of his response to Mr. Hyman's paper. When it came to the matter of the unattractive trend number one-- self-parody-- Mr. West's point was that this is not new, that this has happened with many novelists, and he cited an example of Conrad writing in The Rover work inferior to his earlier work, and in one sense, one might say a parody of it.

In dealing with the second unattractive trend Mr. Hyman noted, the so-called disguises of love, Mr. Hyman suggested that it might not-- Mr. West, I'm sorry-- suggests that it might not be a total loss to have novels dealing with homosexuality, especially if converted in the fiction to seem to be heterosexual love, because there may be a different feeling now from that in the 19th century on the individual part. Not about sex and sexual perversion, but the feeling of entrapment in general, and that the homosexual may feel this lack of freedom and this box he is in, and that this may be a device for appealing to a larger audience using this aberration as a symbol of a larger thing that is more widespread in the population and of more interest to readers in general.

As for pseudo fictions-- real events dressed up, real episodes, real series of events dressed up as novels-- Mr. West's point again, I think, was that we have had these for some time and perhaps they will always be with us. He castigated Mr. Hyman somewhat for the statement about myth and ritual, when Mr. Hyman turned to his hopeful trends. I take it-- and this is a great risk of putting words in a speaker's mouth in these rather abrupt summaries-- but Mr. West's point seemed to be that it was very hard to develop a myth in a society as confused as ours without a central core out of which myths grew in the past. And he didn't see this-- I believe he did not see this as such a hopeful trend.

Mr. O'Connor's speech in general suggested that much that we think of as contemporary in contemporary fiction is not pleasant to Mr. O'Connor. He felt, first of all, that much of modern fiction is too subjective. And he said that from the time of Proust to the present, things have been too subjective in fiction too often, and that Proust, following Bergson's theories, had not examined reality sufficiently. And that, in connection with this subjectivity, there was too much Freud and Jung in modern writers, making them often rather mechanically following systems that they didn't understand and which may have been Mr. O'Connor's opinion false in the first place.

He went on to say that there's too much in modern fiction of elaborate metaphors, so that a character, such as Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses, is not free to act as a human being would, but he has no choices. He must follow out his metaphorical function as one of simultaneously a character in early 20th century Dublin, and in Homer's Odyssey. Mr. O'Connor felt that it is time to return to reality in fiction, and he cited the 19th century as a point when this had reached its peak in the novel.

Mr. Weston, commenting on this speech, said that first, among other things, that he didn't feel that Proust was too subjective. That Proust did deal with reality, and dealt with it effectively. Mr. West doesn't seem to disagree with Mr. O'Connor about the excessive use of metaphor in fiction. Mr. O'Connor had objected to Kafka, and I take it Mr. West shares in this objection, but I don't think he wanted to cut out these elaborate metaphors-- the biggest example being Joyce, for example-- as much as Mr. O'Connor did.

And I don't think that Mr. West felt last evening that the novel could return very readily to the 19th century. That perhaps it had to go on, for better or for worse. The panel in general last evening discussed the questions of what is reality, and this question remains unsettled.

LAUGHTER

Though-- and there was some suggestion that the new techniques were here. We're kind of stuck with it. Why not make out the best one can and try to always be doing better, but not necessarily be moving backward? Now, to turn to this evening-- which I'm very glad to do-- our first speaker will-- I'm glad to stop summary and let the panel, the members of the conference, do what they have been doing and should be doing-- speaking for themselves.

Our first speaker is, in the opinion of many critics, the outstanding novelist writing in French today, and an outstanding novelist of the contemporary world. His works are among the leading literary models for a large number of the most promising young writers. He meets Mr. O'Connor's requirement-- which I forgot to mention a moment ago-- that the novel should reach a large popular audience.

Mr. Simenon is able to do this, his works being translated into a score of languages and being translated also into scores of movies, and reaching a large public audience in all sorts of ways. But simultaneously, his novels have attracted the attention of the most sophisticated readers and critics who regard him as an extraordinarily important figure in contemporary fiction.

The title of Mr. Simenon's speech is "The Era of the Novel?", with a question mark. This is his first formal speech in the United States-- though he has spoken in small groups before-- and it is our great privilege to welcome him here this evening.

APPLAUSE

Ladies and gentlemen, before starting to read my paper, I think I am better to apologize. For about an half hour, you will suffer because of my catastrophic accent.

LAUGHTER

But if it may help, I will suffer even more. So I will do my best, as well, all I can do, and don't shoot the panelists. So now INAUDIBLE.

APPLAUSE

Ladies and gentlemen-- again-- I say I'm not a scholar, but only an artisan. I confess that I was surprised and equally flattered to be honored by your invitation to participate in this seminar. Should I have declined this honor? I hesitated to accept it, realizing how light is my intellectual baggage. Realizing, also, that I am incapable of the discipline of thought, of the logic, and of the clarity to which you are accustomed.

As for my references-- if any-- I knew they well might be sketchy or approximate. Only in a groping fashion can I approach a problem, which is too close to my heart for me not to bring to my expose more passion than clearness of thought, and I cannot ever hope to shine by my originality.

The general theme I was kindly asked to develop was "The future of the novel." I would prefer to use an expression that I used some ten years ago, and that you may deem too optimistic-- the era of the novel. There would remain to show that our era deserves such a label, which for me would be a difficult, if not impossible task, since my contention is more an act of faith than a rational conclusion. Yet I shall try to give you, slapdash, the reasons for my faith in a form of literature which I hold dear.

The first reason will no doubt seem rather a fallacious thought. To me, it is the most striking. Each era has had its favorite medium of expression, be it the epic poem or the tragedy, the medieval romance or the Shakespearean drama, the philosophical tale, the romantic theater, the study of morals, the novel of introspection, and God knows what else. Isn't it a sort of touchstone, to see at a given moment of history, all those who have, or think they have something to say, use the same medium of expression?

As an indication, I would go so far as to put more stock in those who think they have something to say-- in the amateurs and the wits who, being incapable of creativeness, are only following a powerful trend. Young knights and lovely ladies of the court in the 16th century vied with each other in spouting madrigals and epigrams, and later, they were to write tragedies for trying Caligula or King Solomon.

Still later was the advent of Voltaire, Didot, and the encyclopedists that tried their hand at the philosophical tale. Once upon a time, it was common dictum that every young man had a five act play in verse hidden away in his desk. While after La Martin, Walt Whitman, and Baudelaire, everybody more or less delved in poetry, the world being divided into two inequal parts-- the poets on one side, and the so-called bourgeois, or the Philistines, on the other.

Isn't everybody today not writing or dreaming of writing a novel? This medium, long considered inferior-- treated as a poor relation-- had assert itself so forcefully, has acquired such prestige that it has drawn to its fall poets, essayists, and philosophers alike, listing under the same heading such names as those of Joyce and Proust, of Dreiser, Thomas Mann, and Gide, of Gertrude Stein, of Thomas Hardy and Aldous Huxley, of professors and self-made men, of INAUDIBLE

And I take it as a sign of the times that a school like Sade should have chosen the artifice of the novel as a means to set forth his philosophical theory. As a sign of the times, too, that the taxi driver or the chorus girl should confide, with a sigh, what a novel my life would make if I should only write it.

CHUCKLING

The very internationality of the novel is, in my opinion, one of its main assets. Man today is not interested only in his gods, his heroes, and in the men around him, but in all mankind, from whom he no longer feels utterly remote. This is so true that in most countries of the world, as many, if not more, translations are read than the works in the original language. What literary form stands up better under translation than the novel?

After some firsthand theories, it remains well-nigh impossible to translate Shakespeare's adequately, yet nobody feels the need to learn Russian in order to understand Gogol or Dostoevsky, yet Balzac and Stendhal are appreciated the world over. Yet Faulkner has found a large audience in Europe before gaining recognition in America.

I find another indication of the actuality of the novel-- of it's predominance, which is not, I hope be fleeting-- which will not, I hope be fleeting, sorry-- and this sign is even less conclusive than the others. During the last decades, men have invented new mechanical devices, which were such tempting, practical, and spectacular media of expression, that each time a new one cropped up, the death of reading-- the death of the novel-- was widely heralded.

Yet whether the cinema, radio, or television, it is precisely from the novel that those media draw the greater power of their raw material. And it is not done to make things easy or to save time, because the raw material already exists. The fact is that, with a few exceptions, the original scripts like plausible, lifelike characters-- characters with compelling personalities. And it is finally in the works of the novelist that such characters have to be solved.

One last thing last sign impressed me while the theater has so long enjoyed an autonomous existence, and, at certain times, an unchallenged supremacy, there are now on Broadway, on the London or Paris stages, countless offerings which are adaptations of novels. From Tobacco Road, to Gigi, from Mr. Roberts to the works of Molière, of Cocteau, and of Isherwood.

Not only does the author of a successful novel immediately receive bids for the dramatic heights, but stage adaptations are now covered in the standard printed contact forms of the publishing houses. Commercialization? Perhaps. But this commercialization of the novel, running the gamut of magazines serialization, the motion pictures, radio, television, and the theater, is no less a sign of the times than it's, to me, the fantastic upsurge of the paperbacks.

No longer is the novel as it once was-- food for the scholars, the snobs or the id-el-- idle-- I don't know. Id-el or idle, choose it.

LAUGHTER

One form one another, it has broken into everyday living. Talking so much about the past and the present, I must seem to be playing hooky from the theme given to me to develop, which was the novel of tomorrow. But in order to foresee what the novel will become, it is not indispensable that to know, first of all, what it will not be. To know what things, for one reason or another, are not, or will no longer be, a part of its essence.

Literary forms, like artistic forms in general-- whether Gothic architecture, or Gregorian singing, for example-- have all followed the same evolution. Fumbling at birth, borrowing from their predecessors, gradually adapting themselves to the needs of the moment, and at the height of their glory, achieving classical purity. At that point, rules such as the dramatic unities were established.

Tending to protect, to keep the perfection. To make it impervious to change, and against those rules, sooner or later, artists have revolted, thereby creating another chaos out of which would emerge another school of thought. Has the novel ever known such rigor of discipline?

As early as the Middle Ages, it is true, with the chivalric tales which give their name to the genre, each century or portion of century was marked by a certain number of works of a determinate facture. And no doubt is it to the Middle Ages that one must go back to discern some unity in the novel. For, as time went on, works most different in inspiration or form were tagged with the same love label.

Be it at Don Quixote or Pantagruel, Gulliver or Candide, (SPEAKING FRENCH), Robinson Crusoe or Robin Hood, be they from Fenimore Cooper, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Melville. For a long time, under regimes afraid of freedom of thought and of expression, fiction was just a means to state political or philosophical ideas as safely as possible.

Walter Scott and his successors balled about the romantic novel, which was the starting point for Balzac's social fresco while Stendhal was already trying to disassemble man as he would have the mechanism of a clock.

I shall borrow from my friend Robert Desnos, French poet and novelist who died of exhaustion in Dachau at the very moment of its liberation by American troops, the diverse designations of the novel. He writes, "The psychological novel, the novel of introspection, the realistic, naturalistic, and social novels, the novel with a purpose, the originalistic, allegorical, and fantastic novels, the roman noir, the romantic novel, the penny dreadfuls, the serials, the humoristic and poetic novels, the novel of anticipation of an adventure, the novel of the sea, the detective and scientific novels, the biographical, satirical, philosophical, and sentimental novels, the novel of love, the sexy novel, the sagas, the Episcopalian novel, the novel of"-- and there's more. Let's not add what hodgepodge, what confusion.

How can one describe this misshapen monster, this limitless genre which no critic has ever clearly defined? How can one get his bearings among those arbitrary divisions which apply sometimes to styles, sometimes to subject matter, sometimes to the intellectual stand of the writer, sometimes to the weight of the novel or to the reading public.

Yet I am convinced that is it is out of this chaos that the genre will emerge, is already emerging, a very definite genre which will one day acquire its rules, will obtain a sort of purity, and remain as the mark of our time. Those peoples who, in the course of history, have found themself for a time at the head of civilization generally had to start by concerning themselves with the gods and each time furnished the hieratic period.

Then, when men became enhanced by their heroes came the epic, or classical, period, followed, when the individual became concerned with himself and his weaknesses, by the so-called realistic period. A few hours in a museum with its paintings and sculptures are enough to trace this evolution from the gods to man, oft repeat in the course of time.

Are we on the verge of a new cycle and, consequently, of hieratic era? Isn't man, on the contrary, ever more anxious to discover himself and to discover his fellow man? Where better than in the novel will he make this discovery?

It is Paul Valéry, the exact opposite of a novelist if ever there was one, who put the following words in the mouth of Mr. Teste. "If even I could know what makes a fool tick." And the same Valéry writes elsewhere, "The novelist gives life."

The Spanish essayist José Bergamín defines the genre in INAUDIBLE. The novel is the human revelation of the war. While Bergamín talks of the paradoxical and then crude reality with nothingness. And the French critic, Boulgadaen, writes: "The novel answers man's curiosity about other man, which can go from the most vulgar to the highest forms. Need for indiscretion, but also the need for knowledge."

I would like to be the passerby, the wish to get away from oneself, the wish to compare oneself with others, to penetrate a rhythm which is not ours if we cannot impose our own, the will to know, which can become a will of betterment. The question, what did he do there's another-- what would I have done in his stead?

Does it not seem as if man, in his uneasy concern, felt the need to reassure himself by a comparison with other men? Are they of the same mettle? Are they humiliated by the same weaknesses, by the same surrenders? And do they sometimes succumb to the same temptations?

Man, often unable to discover on his own the truth about his fellow man, will seek in the novel the answer to his doubts. The novel satisfies man's curiosity about other men. And that curiosity becomes all the more universal and relentless that the dogmas are more shaken or forgotten, that the guardrails are missing, that the end of a duel, as happens now, rid of social barriers, is left more to himself with all the opportunities for the best and for the worst.

Up to the last century, only a minority of people knew how to read. And for that minority, the literary works were written. In passing, we might note that this possibly explains the long-lasting pre-eminence of the theater, furnishing as it did flesh-and-bones illustrations of ideas and passions.

It is significant that the decline of the theater, which is sometimes attributed to the cinema, should have started much before, coinciding as it did with mass education. In the past, the theater was not a luxury but a necessity. Together with the art of eloquence, which happens to be also on the wane, it was the only means of addressing the masses.

Literature, which was geared to the taste of scholars and snobs, could afford all the subtleties, even all the preciosities, and it kept this somewhat exclusive aspect for some time after the enactment of compulsory education. It is so true that a misunderstanding arose then which is still not entirely cleared up.

Mostly in the second half of the last century, we witnessed, next to those works of which I have just spoken, the birth of a literature called popular, a literature of potboilers and penny dreadfuls established on a purely commercial basis. It has left its mark. Many are those who remain convinced that works which have nothing in common with literature, save to be printed and sold in volume form, are indispensable to the public at large and that the criterion for the serious novelist is to be accessible only to the chosen few.

Personally, I disagree with this contention. And the success in cheap editions of highly esteemed, unworthy works, even as the success sometimes needs to be bolstered by teasing jackets, appears to prove me right. Yet again, the novel must be other than a gymnastic of the mind, an erudite game, or the performance of a stylist.

If the novel is to satisfy the curiosity of man for his fellow man, its essential quality will be human resonance. And without going back too far in time, it is easy to establish that those novelists who have had the most consequence and who, sooner or later, have had the biggest audience were those who led a greater emphasis of mankind.

Critics who were the contemporaries of Balzac deplored what they called his execrable style and wrinkled their noses at Stendhal, just as have the bookish Englishmen at the works of Dickens, then of Stevenson. As for Dostoevsky, he was so careless as to change the names of his characters as he went along. And did not the purest band against Melville, as they did later against Dreiser, and as they do now against a few who are their most authentic successors?

It is Desnos again who speaks of "the invisible style peculiar to those works that are called eternal." And I am fond of thinking that he does not refer simply to the construction of sentence and the choice of words but to a more essential simplicity, to the self-effacement of the creator before his creation.

Someone has written about the last decades of the French novel, "Behind 99% of the novelist hides a bashful essayist or poet." This refers precisely to the era during which France, after producing the Balzac, the Flaubert, the Zola, the Maupassant, and the Proust, has seen the prestige of our novelists diminish, not only abroad but in the country itself.

And who replace them in the favor of the elite or of the general public alike? A handful of American novelists whose names are Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and a few others. Gertrude Stein, in a single sentence, has explained this phenomenon. "And then American realism became harder and sharper, and French realism became softer and more precious."

This would remain true if we were to replace the word "realism," too often used to denote a school of thought, by the word "novel." And it is precisely in the American novel of today that I perceive the basis for the novel of tomorrow, for what I would like to call the true novel.

Gide, who pondered these questions long, used the expression "true novel" also but gave those words the opposite meaning of the one I gave them here. For him, true novel means that novel which deals not with man but with ideas to bind somehow the disincarnate narrator, stripped of their identity and of their faces.

Of Edouard, the writer in The Counterfeiters, Gide wrote, "As soon as it becomes necessary to clothe the characters, to determine their social standing, their career, their income, as soon, especially as it becomes necessary to provide them with neighbors and relatives, to invent a family and friends for them, he's bored and closes up shop." I would like to call true novel that novel which would exclude all that is not the essence of the novel. All that is olde can be deemed to be impurities.

While reading Balzac, for instance, or Tolstoy or Stevenson, it is easy to discern what was necessary or useful at the time they wrote and what is obsolete today, what consequently belongs or does not belong to the essence of the novel. Let ten people of different tastes and of culture read one of their books, and I am convinced that the ten will skip the same passages or will be content to skim through.

They will skip the descriptions, first of all, which in the last century often took up several pages for the simple reason that later photography, nowadays trade magazine and periodicals, now in the movies and, perforce, television, had familiarized the public with certain settings. It takes but few words today to conjure the image of the Champs-Élysées before the eyes of an American reader or to evoke New York Harbor for European readers because we have unconsciously assimilated the settings, and they become alive with a simple trick.

We know, too, how and where live people of such and such social condition, how they dress, eat, and drink. If Balzac applied himself to spelling phonetically Nucingen's accent, which gives us some rather a hard reading, let us note that this was indispensable in an era when people have not shuttled back and forth, when the reader from Tulle or Angouleme had never heard a German talk.

When Balzac writes of a banker or of a tradesman like César Birotteau, he set forth technical details of their business which have become familiar to the bulk of the readers through the widely distributed newspapers of our day. You have guessed my plan. Let the novel be free of all that's not its intrinsic duty, free of what the public can take elsewhere.

And long is the list of servitudes which no longer bind the contemporary novelist. Be they Balzac, Dickens, or the Russians, their works forcibly contained some didactic elements. Count the pages where Balzac interrupts the course of his story to expound the scientific discoveries or the philosophical theories of the moment.

A casual mention would not have been enough. Those ideas were available only in learned works which were beyond the public's reach, while now, they are covered each week, along with discoveries in nuclear physics or in biology, by the popular magazines.

Need we still give proof that an alcoholic is a pathological case, that man's responsibility is relative, that some childhood memories can hound our lives and influence our deportment? Everybody knows this only too well, and the sexual life of different categories of peoples takes up a good third of all that is printed in the periodicals. All this, which is human, certainly does remain within the field of the novel, but it no longer calls for the same emphasis.

Even politics, now that every man and woman participate through their vote in the country's government, now that television brings into our homes the voices and the gestures of our leaders, even politics have lost its mystery, just like war has stripped geography and faraway countries of their glamour. In other words, the newspapers and the cinema, radio and television, easy traveling and compulsory education, have gradually relieved the novelist of part of a burden he thought himself duty-bound to shoulder. His field has narrowed. Other means of expression deal more adequately with picturesqueness, science, philosophy, and even ethics.

What's left to the novel? There remains precisely that which I hold to be its object and its nobility. There remains the living matter-- in other words, man, man with his heroism and his weaknesses, his greatness and his pettiness, his enthusiasms and his distaste, his patience and his fears, man who seeks himself so avidly and who seeks in the deportment of his fellow man reasons for its own excuses or hopes, for self-condemnation or self-indulgence, reasons to live in peace with himself or with others.

Man, face to face with destiny, that main preoccupation of the NON-ENGLISH, man in the grip of his passions, as tagged in the Shakespearean drama, INAUDIBLE, man and his ambitions of the Balzacian cycle, man pitted against himself answers Dostoevsky, and, finally, man who knows himself no more, who is afraid of becoming just a unit in the flock, of being crushed by the machine he has ambitiously conceived, and who seeks his proper place, his reason for being alive, his reason to believe.

Isn't this a vast, a fascinating realm? To recreate man, whom all the other men recognize to be brothers and who help them expel the fears. Quite simply, to recreate man with the symbols, means, and words so that, discovering them, we discover ourselves so that we may bow even more deeply enter the mystery of our own essential being, which, since Adam, terrifies us.

Shall I try to explore my thoughts fully? I am not sure that I can. For centuries, not only did mankind live under the discipline of dogmas but their influence extend to art, science, and government.

Each generation, or nearly, bred an ideal type whom everyone tried to resemble. And this ideal man served as a prototype in fields as different as, for instance, medicine and law. Even when, around the middle of the last century, rationalism attempt to shake off religion and replace it by science, this same rationalism adopted a dogmatic form and was only substituting one prototype for another, and hardly different prototype.

Did we not, in the last few decades, witness a complete transformation in the way human beings contemplate the species? It is not random that I spoke just now of medicine and law. It would be intriguing for a specialist to study from a strictly medical point of view the successive meanings which in one century were given to the words healthy man.

More essential still is the evolution of the concept of individual responsibility which forces most countries having them to change their laws, at least to amend them repeatedly and to transform their penal systems. Hardly 40 years ago, legally, as well as medically, a drunkard was a drinker fully responsible for his downfall while now, in every large city, he benefits from special clinics where he is treated as a medical case.

So it goes, too, for most of the delinquents whose fate depends less and less upon the judges and more and more upon the psychologist and the psychiatrist. Man is no longer a unit. The world is no longer made up of good and bad people who must be rewarded or punished but of human beings whose laws begin to recognize complexity and contradictory instinct of human beings whom institutions try to handle sociably-- in other words, to assimilate into society.

The same evolution exist in pediatrics and in the schools where the world's good or bad pupils are pretty near become taboo. And what about the multitude of diverse schools admitted in the different states indicating that the relationship of two people is no longer based on a dogma or on a few essential truths but suffer from the complexity of the human being and from his INAUDIBLE?

It is as though, after millenniums, the individual who was thought himself bound to resemble a predetermined model, who felt guilty every time he strived for it, it is as though the individual suddenly realized that what he had taken for an ideal is but a cold statue and that truth does not reside outside of him but within him. Would that not explain, for a large part, the frenetic thirst of man for knowledge of his fellow man?

And the novelist, consciously or not, strives to furnish this knowledge to mankind while seeking it for himself. And often, he has opened new vistas to the scientists, paving the way, as in the case of Dostoevsky, without whom Freud and his disciples might not have existed. And I don't think it is only in fun but also in the hope of countering the human truths that a philosopher like Bertrand Russell showed at the age of 80 termed the novel.

The novel, be it called the novel of today or of tomorrow, is still feeling its way. Manifold, it is a sort of catchall where all the genres mingle and crossbreed. And I like to think that its effervescence it's a sign not of decadence but, on the contrary, a sign of vitality.

Trends are beginning to take shape, some which already have their masterpieces, two such trends, especially, fluctuating, at par one day, wildly apart the next. And if I have a personal favorite, I would not dare predict which will win out at the last.

I am speaking of the saga on the one hand, that novel commonly called in France the roman-fleuve, which with Thibault, we could term passive novel, and on the other hand, the roman chryse, the pinpoint novel, so to speak, which is nearer to the Greek tragedy and which might be the active novel.

In the saga, the lives of the characters flow like river. A generation, sometimes two or three, a family or more, a town, a group of people, had slowly to work toward their destiny, leaving the dead by the roadside, giving birth along the way, to the man of tomorrow whose story other novelist will tell.

The second form, harsher and quicker, gets hold of a person at a turning point--

Giving birth along the way to the man of tomorrow whose story all the novelist will tell. The second form, INAUDIBLE gets hold of a person at a turning point in his life where his fate is decide and to the this crisis gathering the essential threads of the past, indicating the possible outlets makes the reader share the anguish of the hero faced with the choice he must make.

Of the two techniques which will prevail, each has hold in the past. The first in the picaresque novel and in memoirs, the second in the Greek tragedy and in the drama. I sometimes wonder if the ultimate decision will not be due to very prosaic and near commercial considerations.

Can the majority of readers as a fall, start reading a book it will take them a week or two to finish. Is that everybody's daily life too complex for the impression left by the first chapters to remain intact and return at the proper time? The roman chryse intense concentrate offers from this point of view, the same advantageous as a play or a film, which seen as a stretch presents no break of tension.

If the miracle plays of the Middle Ages sometimes lasted as long as three days, and there were the sagas of those times, it is difficult to imagine an audience of the 16th century sitting through the first two acts of a Shakespearean drama, the last of which they would see a week or a month later.

Anyway, it matters little what mold the novel of tomorrow will be pulled into. What matters is that the novel should exist, not as a game for murder and not as a pastime for dilettantes or snobs, not as a form of commercial exploitation either, but to answer the need of man to know his fellow man and to know himself. If this is so, and I wish it with all my heart, it will be possible, one day to speak of the era of the novel.

That was Georges Simenon, the first speaker at the second session of the Harvard 1953 Summer School Conference on the Contemporary Novel.

[APPLAUSE]

Our next speaker is Mr. Ellison the author of a novel entitled the Invisible Man. This novel as you noticed last evening and as the members of the conference noticed in the session this afternoon was continually referred to by the other speakers as a model of some sort. No one made any derogatory remarks, and everyone seemed to make a great many very favorable remarks about this novel.

Mr. Ellison, with this novel, won the National Book Award. He's also won not only favorable comments from speakers of last evening and this afternoon but very wide favorable comment from reviewers and critics in general.

Mr Ellison, in addition to being a novelist, is a writer of shorter fiction, of articles, and of criticism. It is a pleasure to introduce him this evening. His subject is "Certain Neglected Aspects of the American Novel."

APPLAUSE

I think I would feel safer if I were trying to read my novel than trying to say something about that which I know very little, however, it might have the value of allowing you some insight into my way of thinking about the novel. First, let me sketch certain assumptions concerning the nature of the novel in general which will give tonality to what I wish to say about the American novel. Let me begin by reminding you of a characteristic of the novel which seems so obvious that it's seldom mentioned and which, because it is ignored, tends to make most discussions of fiction rather abstract.

And it's this. By its nature the novel seeks to communicate a vision of experience. The key word there is communicate. Thus, whenever it may, whatever else it might be--and it certainly strives to be a work of art-- it is basically a form of communication. Its medium of communication, like that all of the fictive arts, is a familiar experience of a particular people within a particular society, and indeed the novel can communicate with us only by appealing to that which we "know" (in quotes), uh, that is our body of common assumptions, and through this it can proceed to reveal to us that which we do not know or it can affirm that which we believe to be reality.

Thus, the novel in a certain sense of the term is rhetorical. I know that's a bad word these days but the novel comes in for some of it. It's rhetorical because it seeks to persuade us to accept the novelist's view of that experience which we have shared with him and through which we become creatively involved in the illusionary and patterned depiction of life which we call fictional art.

Of course, we repay the novelist in terms of our admiration to the extent that he justifies and intensifies our sense of the real. Secondly, I believe that the basic function of the novel, and that function which gives it its form and which brought it into being, is that of seizing from the flux and flow of our daily living those abiding patterns of experience, which through their repetition, help to form our awareness of the nature of human life and from which man's sense of himself and his value are--I'm sorry, are seized.

It is no accident that the novel emerges during the 18th century and becomes most fully conscious of itself as an art form during the 19th century. For before, when God was in his Heaven and man was relatively at home in what seemed to be a stable and well-ordered world and if not well-ordered, at least stable, there was no need for a novel.

Men agreed as to what constituted reality. They were gripped by the illusion of a social and metaphysical stability and social change--change, another keyword in the understanding of the novel--was not a problem. But when the middle class broke the feudal synthesis, the novel came into being and emerged, I believe, in answer to the vague awareness which grew in men's minds that reality had cut loose from its base and that new possibilities of experience and new forms of personality had been born into the world.

Class lines were beginning to be liquidated and to be reformed. New types of men arose mysteriously out of a whirling reality which now revealed itself to be Protean in its ability to rapidly change its appearance. Perhaps the novel answers man's fearful awareness that behind the facade of social organization, manners, customs, rituals, and institutions, which give form to what we call society, there lies only chaos. For man knows despite the certainties which his social organizations serve to give him that he did not create the universe and that the universe is not at all concerned with human institutions and values, and perhaps even what we call sanity is no more than a mutual agreement among men as to the nature of reality, a very tenuous definition of the real which allows us some certainty and stability in our dedicated task of humanizing the universe.

Now we don't like to think of such problems except through disciplines, through mirrors. They're like Medusa. We can only confront it by looking back through the polished shield. I guess that's Mr. Hyman's armed vision to an extent.

We serve, we try to look at these problems, this problem of the instability of human life through the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, and, of course, art. Because while man can live in chaos he cannot accept it. Now, during the war, I discovered how dangerous it could be even to pretend that one is insane. Because I observed certain people who in their effort to be released from military service, feigned certain forms of insanity.

Well, they were successful, but they played a joke on themselves because several of these people are definitely, mildly insane. They have broken that very fine line of the rational and they're thrown outside. They put themselves outside of that agreement, which we have made in order to ensure our minds against the overwhelming threat of the universe, which is irrational and utterly unconcerned with us.

In brief, we know that nature can crush man and that arts and techniques are but magic objects in our quest for certainty. If you cross the North Atlantic as I had to do very often during the war in a storm in a ship, sometimes good-sized ships, you get a very sharp awareness of how frail society is and how fragile are these things in which we put our trust.

Fortunately, they always got us there and back. But when it's bouncing around out there you begin to feel, well, human life is quite frail indeed. But let us return here to the novel as a functional form. It is usually associated, that is the novel is, with the 19th century and the middle class.

For it's during the 19th century and the ascendancy of the middle class that it achieved its highest consciousness as a formal structure. It was very vibrant and alive, and because this rising class accepted the dichotomies of good and evil, dark and light, all the ambiguous stuff of life, the novel was quite an alive form of communication.

If we remember Bill Sikes made possible Pip's great expectations. That is, the good and the bad were seen as being entwined. Possibility, and it was a time of possibility because it was a time of great social changes and because social change always implies certain terrors, we had at the time a class, the middle class, which was quite willing to run the risk to expose itself to the terrors of chaos in order to seize the prize of possibility. Now, during those times, men who viewed freedom not simply in terms of a necessity, but in terms of possibility.

And it was the novel which could communicate this new found sense of possibility, of freedom and necessity, this new sense of mystery, this awareness of the inhumanity of nature and the universe and most important, it could forge images of man's ability to say no to chaos and affirm him in his strength to humanize the world, to create that state of human certainty and stability, yes and love, which we like to call the good life.

Now, I have stressed the specific nature of the novel. That is that it sought to communicate a particular experience shared by a particular people and a particular society and I'd like to stress that again. There is, except for the purposes of classification, no abstract novel nor is there a universal novel, except in the most abstract sense.

Any universality which the novel achieves must be achieved through the depiction of a specific experience, specific people. Thus, there is no, there is a Spanish novel, a Russian novel, a French novel, an English novel, and an American novel and so forth dealing with particular individuals and with specific complex, the specific complexities of experience as found within these various cultures.

There's been a lot of confusion about this problem, so much so that in the 18th century most of our novels were really imitations of English novels. We still thought that we were a colony of England and we were trying to copy the forms of English society.

And we know that as late as Henry James and his work on Hawthorne he goes into what was missing in terms of our customs, manners, and institutions, which made the stuff of the English novel. Well, it's my opinion that there is a direct relationship between the form of a society and the form of a novel which grows out of that society.

I don't want to go into any elaboration of that idea but it does underlie what I think to be the ground out of which the American novel came. We didn't begin to have an American novel of course until writers, and in fact until the audience of the writers as well grew conscious that there was something different about the American experience. It was not English. We did not have the American, I mean the English institutions, and indeed, we had no need for them. And if we had need for them, we could not create them here, because we didn't have the saw, we didn't have the ships, the island. We didn't have any of those wonderful things, which made for the wonderful novels and plays and poetry. But we did have something else. We had a society dedicated to a conception of freedom, which was new and vibrant, from which the social unit was not that of class, or only class, but of national groupings. And though classes emerged, they were and are still confused and cut across by the nature of our melting pot. That is a society made up of people from many backgrounds dragging with them many cultural traditions, customs, folklore, and what not, a varied society made up of many many peoples and so forth.

There was something else too. We had a body of ideology, which was conscious, was accepted and known, talked about, explicitly and implicitly by most Americans, those who had been here and certainly by those immigrants who kept coming to swell the numbers and to help make this into a great nation.

These ideas were of course the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and so forth. They were quite serious. A lot of people today don't take them so seriously now, but they were so serious that if we trace back and look at 19th century American fiction, we find that most of the great novels deal, in imaginative terms, of course, with this, these ideas as a background.

They are the unstated assumptions. They are the ground of possibility, the conception of what we wanted to do, and we find that, at least I think so, that such novelists as Melville and Hawthorne, and such writers and essayists as Thoreau and Emerson, poets and whatnot, were always concerned with the health of democracy.

Now, they didn't do it in a narrow sociological way. I'm not, uh, I don't intend to imply that. Melville could take a ship and make that ship American society, um, man it with men who represented the various races of man, the various cultural traditions which could be found in an ideal American, and he could project that in terms of overpoweringly artistic imagery and action.

But that isn't, that is only the beginning of it, rather. We come to Twain, and we find a split, and it's this split, which allows us to get at what, I think, makes us feel so dissatisfied with the contemporary American novel. And it comes in Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn, of course, is , uh, has been, and was for years considered a child's book, a boy's book. Actually it's one of the greatest of American novels and a moral drama and again we find it dealing with the problem of democracy, what is good about it, what is bad about it, where have we failed in living up to the American dream, where have we failed to live up to the ideals of democracy.

I might interrupt here to say that the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, in short, the ideals, might take the role, might be called the myth that was being accepted and rejected here last night. The actions or the failure of actions to make that myth manifest might be called the rite, the ritual, which was accepted or ignored here last night, but that was part of the conscience concern of Twain. [PAPER SHUFFLING]. And just to keep it a bit specific, let us recall that, the point in the novel when N-- Jim has been stolen by the king and the duke and has been sold, which presents Huckleberry Finn with the problem of recovering Jim.

Two ways were open to him. He could rely upon his own ingenuity to help Jim escape or he could write to the widow Watson, requesting reward money to have Jim returned to her. But there is a danger in this course, remember, since it's possible that the angry widow might sell Jim down the river into a harsher slavery.

But the outcast Huck, struggling to keep his peace with the community, decides that he'll write the letter. Then he wavers and I shall quote, "It was a close place," he tells us. "I took it, the letter up, and holding it in my hand, I was trembling because I'd got to decide forever twixt two things, and I knowed it.

I started a manner, sort of holding my breath, then says to myself, all right then, I'll go to hell. And I tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they were said. And I let them stay said and never thought no more about reforming. I shove the whole thing out of my head and I said, I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and others weren't. And for a start, I would steal Jim out of slavery again."

And a little later, and defending his decision to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn comments, he says, "I know what you will say. You'll say it's dirty, lowdown business, but I'm low down and I'm going to steal him free."

Well, with this development, we have arrived at a key moment in the novel and by ironic reversal, we've arrived at a key moment in American literature. It's a pivotal moment announcing a change of direction in the plot and it is a reversal as well as a recognition scene like that in which Oedipus discovers his true identity wherein a new definition of moral necessity is being formulated by Huckleberry Finn and by Mark Twain. Huck has struggled with a problem poised by the clash between property rights and humanism, between what the community considered the proper attitude toward an escaped slave and his knowledge, his, Huck's knowledge, of Jim's humanity, which he had gained through their adventures together as they floated down the river. I'm told that the river has been described as a symbol of moral consciousness and awareness, another fighting term for some people here.

LAUGHTER

Nevertheless, Huck has made his decision on the side of humanity. In this passage, Twain has stated the basic moral issue spinning around negroes and the white American democratic ethics, and it is a dramatization of the highest point of tension generated by the clash between the direct human relationships of the frontier and formulated in the myth of American democracy.

That is, it clashes, and it is in clash, in conflict with the inhuman, market-dominated relationships which have been fostered by, which were fostered by, the rising middle class. Well, what I'm trying to get at it is this. Aside from the strict moral concern of Twain, you have,

I'm sorry, aside from the concern with language, with the art of fiction, with depiction and so forth, you have this great moral concern. Now, the man who made Huckleberry Finn an important -- well, he didn't make it important but he made us aware of its importance for twentieth century American writing--was Ernest Hemingway.

And we have heard quoted very often, Mr. Hyman referred to it last night, Hemingway's statement that when you read Huckleberry Finn, which he considers the fountainhead of modern American prose fiction, you must stop at that point where N-- Jim is stolen from the boys, because after that, Twain indulged himself in fakery.

Well, here we have dramatized I think a dissociation of the American sensibility which was to be enacted in terms of its future reduction, its lack of concern with moral issues, and in terms of technique itself.

Hemingway could not see the implication of that part of the plot which gives Huckleberry Finn its meaning, unless we accept it as a boy story. If Huck and Tom Sawyer had not made the effort, at least, to steal Jim free again, and it's important that they steal him free, that they be involved in guilt, in crime, in darkness, since it's a dark man.

Chaos, terror, all of these line up behind the figure, the symbol of Jim. Hemingway could not understand that this was a necessary completion of the action. He was ready to truncate it and many people have done so. They have failed to see that connection and thus Huckleberry Finn lost, for many years, its meaning.

Well now, Hemingway, as we know -- I don't have to do more than sketch it in -- is the father of all of us who tried to write in the twentieth century in American society. He's done wonderful things with language. He has shown us much about Twain, much about Gertrude Stein, much about what could be done with words, shown us much about depicting facts, depicting actions in one thing or the other.

And, I don't mean to imply that he is not a very moral man. He is. I think that his novels are very much concerned with what is good in life, not in an ethical sense, but what constitutes the good life and what makes for the bad life.

But, in doing so, he found it necessary to reduce the American novel. The big themes are gone. Now, get me. I don't mean to say that there was any prerequisite on the part of the American writer to write about negroes. I don't mean that at all. For me, negroes in terms of the novel, are symbolic. They represent value not because I say so, but because of our economy. Because we do have this sacred ground beneath us which declares that all men are equal.

And when we violate that, we must find some way of symbolizing it. And we have clustered that around the figure of the slave, the negro, as earlier we have clustered it around the Indian and the Gypsy and so forth. These things run through American and English writing and have done so since, I suppose, the 18th Century. But what I'm trying to get at is this.

Assuming that there is this connection between American life and the form of its fiction. Twain, yes, and even more so, Melville, could get at the big theme, could get at the mystery of human relationships and of social change, he could get at the swiftness of development, the emergence and dying away of institutions, which mark the rapid emergence of the American nation, and of American society.

He could get at that because he used a large frame. And I suppose there is some connection between this and his being a major novelist. But, it was with the twentieth century, after reconstruction, after the war, when we decided that we could no longer sustain the uncertainty of fighting this thing out. We had lost many people on both sides.

And we had made a shambles of many possibilities. We did, however, create others. Thank God. And we were tired. We were no longer willing to face the tragic implications of American life. And novelists, as I say, seemed to come into being in answer to the moods of society.

We were no longer willing to face these problems. And being no longer willing, we got a novelist who could do in terms of literature what we were doing in terms of our social living. We could develop techniques, developed a science, develop a great industrial empire and so forth but we could not deal with the complex problems of an American society in which all men were not free and in which all men were attempting to be free and in which some men were attempting to keep other men from being free. This was the reality and the myth lay elsewhere. And we were not prepared to deal with it.

So our prose fiction went in the direction of experimentation, but it was an experimentation which while it gave birth to many wonderful technical discoveries, ways of writing, ways of seeing and feeling, of making the reader participate within the world of fiction, it could not make the American face the moral implications of his life. Which brings us down to today, I think, and very briefly.

We've had a generation of imitators of Hemingway and, some good and some very poor. We've had a few other novelists like Steinbeck who went completely on the technical, experimental kick. But something had gone out of the experimentation and that was the will to dominate this complex reality.

Then comes the thing of imitating European writing, being aware that European writing was important, being aware, through the European writers, that our novelists were important, and finally we discover Faulkner. And there's a funny thing about Faulkner, we discover.

That he experiments, he's been very busy. He can do all of the things as was pointed out this morning. He could do what Joyce did, sometimes with more success, because he was not the pioneer, but the second generation who could refine.

He could write many-layered novels, which were full of change, which were full of conflict, but at the same time, which dealt with this great moral problem of American life, centered around discrimination and so forth-- the unfreedom which lies within the land of freedom -- and he could do this so well that the very sharp reader could understand it and the very unsharp reader, the reader who was interested only in the realistic nature of things could also enjoy it. Now Faulkner has been accused of being too vague, too obscure.

And, I have never accepted that. I have always been able to read Faulkner, and I've been able to understand him, perhaps because part of my background is Southern, or partly, I suppose, because I lie between the two traditions, between the two cultures, that of the south, that of the north, that of Europe, and that of America.

Which reminds us that the American novel always functioned on one of its levels to document American reality and to describe the nature of the American. It tried to project an image of the American, which would serve to unify these varied national and cultural groups into something which could be accepted by us all.

Now that is a problem, which has been unfinished. It was left unfinished consciously during the 19th century -- since the 20th century, we have, well we have just failed to bother with it, except for this one man Faulkner, I believe -- who picked up the pieces, picked up where Mark Twain left off, kept the moral concern, was intent upon depicting a part of American life, which existed, which is important to us all, but of which we are not sufficiently aware.

What I'm trying to say is this. We assume that America is a known country. It is NOT a known country. If you go out to Oklahoma, as I have been recently, you'll find that people are different, that distances makes differences, that the air, the climate, the way of life. It's all a part of America. We all speak the same language, but it's not the same thing.

And part of the task of the novel is that of documenting this unknownness. As Mr. Simenon just pointed out, we are curious or should be curious about other Americans. Fortunately, there is a change coming. In fact, there is a change at hand.

We are no longer blaming one section of the country for the faults of the other section. We are all beginning to share in the responsibility for the country and I think the novelist, following Faulkner, is attempting to reach out and once more accept that responsibility.

I will define it as a responsibility to make America known to Americans and to help forge the image of the American, which we usually assume to be represented by an Anglo Saxon of Protestant background, I suppose. Maybe in Boston it would be a Catholic, but actually we know that the American is many things, many many things.

And we are still, at least I am still puzzled to know what he is. I know that I am but just what I am is as much a mystery to me as the mystery of what Boston is or what Harvard is. I know it's a college. I've never been here before. Being around it, I see certain evidences of tradition, certain tone and--well other manifestations of the unknown, the mystery of American life.

Another thing which you become aware of when you go back to the provinces after living in the cosmopolitan areas for a while is that you become very sharply aware that Americans are terribly interested in change. They look at you. They listen very sharply to you, to see whether this mysterious thing of change has occurred and just what form it takes.

Will you speak differently? Will you act differently? And they always are very glad when they can say, "Well he's grown up but he hasn't changed." I think that's part of the experience of all of us who have ever wandered back to the provinces.

And I think that this very concern with change becomes an indication of what has been missing in current American fiction. First, it's missed this many-layeredness, this variety and diversity of American life. It's missed this fluidity, which will allow, well, a man like Ralph Bunch, who was a grandson, I suppose, of a slave to become one of our most articulate spokesman.

This is a very mysterious process and we realize how mysterious it is when we consider the fact that there are no institutions in the whole of Bunch's early life which can account for the formation of his personality. How did he become interested in certain ideas? How did he decide that he would prepare himself in such a way that he could perform a very tedious and complex diplomatic function. What I'm trying to get at it is that there is much of mystery in how ideas filter down in America, how they take hold, how personality is formed and so forth.

In short, again, it's an unknown country. The American image is still incomplete. The American reader knows this. He feels that there's something missing. And I think this is one reason that he has turned to reading nonfictional works more than he reads fiction. I think he wants answers to questions now. He feels change. He sees change around him and a certain degree of uncertainty has come back into relationships.

I can remember walking during this spring when I was in North Carolina into a certain room in which a woman became physically ill, not because she had anything against me. She was quite willing to have me there, but I violated something which had given her world stability for years and years, and she could not stand this. Her will could not dominate the physical revulsion which this woman felt.

In such a world there's uncertainty and the novel has a chance of living.

And I shall say this in close. It's assumed that because the novel came into being during the 19th century, that it is the exclusive property of the middle class and because the middle class seems to be dying out, giving way to something else, it's assumed that the novel will die with it, but the novel grows out of this uncertainty. It is a form. It's the art of change, the art of time, the art of reality and illusion. This is its province and as things, and whenever there's crisis, and whenever there's social change, swiftness, acceleration of time, the novel has something to say.

And we can certainly recognize that the world has not slowed down, but it has speeded up. It's whirling faster now than it ever did. And as long as it whirls, there's a possibility for a novel to live.

Our demand now, and I think that's what the younger American novelists are trying to do, is to take advantage of the technical discoveries of the earlier part of the twentieth century and to superimpose them upon the great variety and the swiftness, the changeability, the protean nature of American society. Out of this there can't help but come a new concept of the novel.

It is the kind of novel, which will demand imagination, which as Mr. Simeon said, will be willing to let sociology take care of sociology, philosophers take care of philosophy, and all of those disciplines which now can be acquired through reading nonfiction.

It will be a novel which will really try to deal with the wholeness of America.

Now, I'm not trying to prescribe any sort of official art. I'm only trying to say that it is in this, in the willingness to try to deal with the whole that the magic will emerge and we will have a healthy fiction again.

APPLAUSE

We're going to have a brief commentary on these two papers, and then there will be questions and discussion, part of the people on the stage and questions from the audience following that.

The commentator this evening who will speak for 10, or 12, or 15 minutes on these two papers is Professor Frohock, who has for a long time been professor at Columbia University. And he is now, as of this fall, chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Wesleyan college. He is an authority on contemporary fiction. He's published a book on some aspects of contemporary American novels. And he has published a book on Malraux. Professor Frohock.

[APPLAUSE]

Ladies and gentlemen, what would you do at this point if you were in my place? Here are two men who obviously know their jobs. Simenon, author of 152 or 153-- he doesn't quite remember which-- full-length novels, not to count the nouvelles du court [short stories] and so forth that he adds to that. And Ralph Ellison, who is 150 odd behind Mr. Simenon at the moment, but who has somewhere picked up an inordinate amount of knowledge of what he's at.

While no title was given you for their joint effort, the title of it was obviously, "What is the job of the novelist?" And in spite of certain divergences, it seems to me that they agree remarkably well. At least they agree on certain fundamentals. As far as what Mr. Simenon said was concerned, I make one reservation, simply as an American. It's astounding how American writers look to Europeans.

And I was delighted when after he told us how in France, people felt that every novel hides a bashful essayist or poet. The French turned to reading an American novel, which, if you put it into the hands or if you say that it was done by the hand of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, possibly Hemingway himself was done certainly by an author with an immense lyric gift, capable at times simply of orchestrating a single emotion.

The American novel, as we've known it in the last 20 years, hides a poet also, to such an extent that I would put forth the notion that someone ought to insist a great deal more on the role of sensibility in the American novel between 1920 and 1950. But that isn't what the Europeans read us for. And one wonders, after all, why there should be so much fuss made about the study of comparative literature. One reads. That is the important thing, and we can let it go at that.

Aside from that, I have almost nothing to remark about Mr. Simenon's comment. Obviously, the subject, when we come down to the last analysis, for this European who is a workman in concrete things, if there ever was one, for him, when he is forced for a moment to be abstract, he strips everything else off and says the job of the novelist, somehow or other, is man and the knowledge of man.

And he says it in a tone that I think I recognize, because I've heard it elsewhere. As a writer, says a French novelist, who is as different in many ways from monsieur Simenon as he could possibly be-- I mean, arguably, Malraux-- as a writer, says Malraux, what has obsessed me for the last 10 years, if not man-- and of course, he writes man with a capital.

The capital H on the word "Homme" has become absolutely standard equipment in these last years in Europe. It stands for a new humanism, a humanism that was already visible in Malraux as early as 1931 when he replied to Leon Trotsky regarding the first of his novels, The Conquerors. And he said, I am not. I have not been trying to paint a picture of a revolution. I have been trying to gauge the human condition. Another book he called-- Malraux called The Human Condition. And even his books on art turn out finally to be a poem about man.

Now, so far as I know, monsieur Simenon has not written books about art. So incoherent that it takes months of the most patient effort to read them, I say he has not written-- please understand me-- that kind of book, which turned out finally to be a poem about man. But certainly, he is saying, somewhere or other, that the essential concern of the novelist is la condition humaine [the human condition] as it has been for Sartre, for Camus, for so many who have realized that man in Europe and in the world, but they think especially of Europe, that man has come to desperate straits indeed.

And then, I hear Mr. Ellison a few moments later saying-- he didn't put it quite this way tonight, but he has written words that he could very well have said tonight. They had the same import. The negro was the gauge of the human condition in America, the human condition, la condition humaine.

And in another place in that same writing, he speaks about the truth, the truth regarding the human condition. And I found him saying tonight, man can live in chaos but not accept it, words, which, in the French, appear in the mouth of Gavin, one of my Malraux's heroes in the novel called The Conquerors. These people all speak the same language. Although, they speak it from different vantage points and different angles.

Mr. Ellison goes on to look especially at the plight of the American novelist or the predicament of the-- he would accept the word predicament, Mr. Ellison, I think --the predicament of the American novelist confronted by an amorphous thing that you can almost call the American reality. There is no abstract novel, he says.

Novels are specific things, concrete things. And we shouldn't probably talk about "the" novel. The situation of the American novel is not, from his point of view, the situation, say, of the French, the Scandinavian. Or how do we know what? Each one has its specific situation.

There is almost, he seems to be saying-- or if he's not saying, I am forcing his idea far enough, so that it will say so-- an American reality, which has become a much more difficult thing to handle, I gather, since that eventual dissociation of the American sensibility of which he has spoken.

He feels that we are now at last in the novel -- and when I say we, that's entirely honorific. I mean the novelists. Mr. Ellison said we -- are at last facing the implications of American life. And at this point, he adds one more reason for the admiration for William Faulkner, which is already in so many of us inordinately abundant anyhow.

Facing the implications of American life and in connection with that, Mr. Ellison used a metaphor involving the word for-- the verb forge. And as I was listening, it flashed through my mind. After a while, we read books enough so that these associations are automatic. Forged in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race. And I wasn't thinking of an American, or a Frenchman, or a Belgian, or-- an Irish author was, of course, in my mind.

The American says the problem of the novel is American man. Oh, let's put that right. The American says, the problem of the American novel is man in America. The European says, the problem of the novel, the subject of the novel, is man, l’homme tout court. I think that in that slight difference in words is the essential difference between the European and the American. And I don't think that, in spite of all that, the difference is terribly great.

[APPLAUSE]

Commenting on the addresses by Georges Simenon and Ralph Ellison, Professor Wilbur M. Frohock of Columbia University.

Are there any comments from the members of the panel up here? Anyone who has anything to say objecting to or supporting anything that's been said? Mr. Ellison, would you have anything to say to Mr. Frohock's comments?

Only that I would return again to the specific novel as found in France as against I'd found the United States. And I will have to paraphrase Mr. André Malraux when he says that there's little to discover about the nature of French society. It's well documented from Balzac on, so much so that Malraux could turn his attention to the more abstract predicament of man.

But he didn't just write about man in the abstract. The condition-- I mean man's fate is about and is well documented by his depiction of Shanghai and of revolutionary action. And in fact, someone has pointed out that Malraux is such a good writer that one doesn't feel that this is China seen through the eyes of a European, but that it is China.

However, I do agree with Mr. Frohock that the problem of man is at another level, an abstraction the same. But then, that gives me real hope, because I can write about the predicament of negro characters in the south, let us say, and still speak, if I do it well enough, to those people who are looking at the condition of man, the predicament of man, in its most abstract sense.

Thank you. Mr. Simenon, would you--

Just [INAUDIBLE]

Would you pull that towards you?

is to explain, when I said behind 99% of the novelist hides a bashful essayist or poet, that the term poet here is in a sense, in the pejorative sense, as we employ it very often in France, we mean poet not as Hemingway, or Steinbeck, or Faulkner, but, for example, as Truman Capote is, that means in a sense of aestheticism, you know? That is to explain nothing against the poor novelist.

Mr. Hyman, would you speak to this human condition?

Well, I'd sooner hear Mr. O'Connor on this since the novel, the 20th century novel, he buried last night seems to have revived this evening.

Mr. O'Connor?

I'm afraid I've got very little to say, ladies and gentlemen, except that in case that in the portion of the audience which remains, there is a young writer who wants to write novels or short stories. Do let me explain to him that it's not as serious as all that.

[APPLAUSE]

When I hear all these ponderous words pouring forth-- and I know they mean so much and all the rest of it-- I think of the village idiot in an Irish village who was seen after he had left school, hurling his three schoolbooks into the stream. With the first one he said, "Whereas." And then, he said, "In as much." And then, he hurled the third book in and said, "In so far."

Well, I had a feeling, listening to these two masters of literature, Mr. Simenon, Mr. Ellison, tonight, that I was listening to the story of INAUDIBLE, who was suffering in the interests of the community. And again, I felt all the time like that man that Boswell describes, who said to Dr. Johnson that he himself was very interested in philosophy at one time. But cheerfulness would keep breaking through.

[LAUGHTER]

Mr. West?

[APPLAUSE]

That makes it very difficult, indeed, to go on being serious. But the only thing which I must say really appalls me very much indeed in this discussion is the phrase "an American reality." To think that after a century of the horrors of nationalism, we should start pegging out national areas of reality is so appalling that I can hardly bear to think of it.

It does seem the ultimate in the decay of the idea of Christendom, which has taken place in the last 1,000 years that you could come even to be provincial in your conceptions of reality. I had hoped that we had gone forward to that from that, that we were only concerned with the reality of human beings with which human beings have to deal, that we had gone away from those small, small conceptions of local pictures. All right.

[APPLAUSE]

I don't know, but I'll say, Does anyone up on the stage want to speak about this?

Yes, I do.

[APPLAUSE]

It's all very well to engage in wit. But the novel, Mr. O'Connor, is a very serious concern. I must speak specifically,

[LAUGHTER]

because I feel that that the role is a dedicated one, perhaps because I come to it from a background of music and whatnot, in which all of this was something new to discover.

But I know without having so many great writers behind me-- that is, writers handling the same reality, using the same folklore, in fact, telling some of the same stories, having developed a theme-- that it's quite difficult to seize a part of reality, yes, an American reality, specifically American reality. I don't think it has its value because it's American. And I'm not selling any brand of nationalism.

But it just happens to be a fact. This is the way men live now at this particular time under these particular circumstances. You cannot get away from it. The novel is not an abstract instrument. I will say this, that I believe that in a sense, human life during this particular historical period is of a hope. Otherwise, comparative literature would make no sense, and we'd all be talking in vacuums. But I was very glad that Mr. Frohock pointed out that I owe a great deal to André Malraux.

There is this also to be said, that Malraux's great novels, at least a part of his great novels, turn to mock him now, because he was seeking for that abstract political reality, which was not based upon the customs of a specific people. I don't see how you can get away from it. It's not out of a desire to know-- I mean to sell a phony conception of nationalism. I reject that. I've suffered from it.

But I don't think you can know other people until you know yourself. I don't think that we can understand other peoples until we understand ourselves. I don't think we would send Jimmy Byrnes to enter the U.N. if we understood ourselves, because certainly, he won't understand other people.

[APPLAUSE]

So this is, after all, very serious. And if we're going to discuss ideas, let's discuss ideas. Are we going to crack jokes? I know a few good ones.

[LAUGHTER][APPLAUSE]

I think--

Mr. O'Connor?

My question to Mr. Ellison is, why should the devil have all the tunes?

Well, you dance to yours. I'll have to dance to mine.

Mr. West, would you-- all right. Fine. Are there any questions from the audience to be addressed to the speakers or anyone on the panel? If you'll raise your hands rather higher than last evening, it's easier for the men with the microphones to see them. Please, would you wait until-- speak into the microphone.

I have been interested in the fact that so much emphasis has been laid upon the novel as a means of exploration of man, as giving us the knowledge of man. Now, if one followed the argument of monsieur Simenon, for instance, could we ask the question, what will happen to the novel if its essence is the knowledge of man when psychology, and history, and sociology become popularized? Is there not some danger in placing the essence of the novel in the knowledge of man? And what do you mean by knowledge in that sense?

Yes. I think I understand. I am not absolutely sure. But what I mean is that it's not the business of the novelist to discuss conscientiously sociology, or psychology, or any techniques we may discuss anywhere. He has to put as much humanity in his work. And if it's sociology or psychology in it, it must be unconscious. You understand what I mean?

If you start a novel with the idea of exposing some theory, some theories, you will write a wrong novel, absolutely a bad, bad novel. But if you start with just man, and you follow man, you will have a novel. And maybe it will be psychology in it, and even philosophy, and everything. But you don't have to expose it. Do you know what I mean? It's something absolutely different.

It's like Mr. INAUDIBLE who was making prose without knowing it. Everybody makes prose every day. And everybody makes psychology every day, but not the same way that Mr. INAUDIBLE, for example, will start a novel with a trained thought. Today, I will treat the man who did a bad confession to his priest, and then he proved some theory. He proved nothing, and he did always a bad novel. That's what I try to explain.

[APPLAUSE]

And-- I'm sorry. And it gave me the occasion to answer at the same time at Mr. O'Connor, because when he asked to have moral or something of this kind in a novel, it's exactly the same thing. We have a proverb in France who said that you can't do art with good intentions. It's impossible.

Moral may come later, or it may be moral in your work, but you don't start to moralize the people who start to be-- to do a novel there. Michelangelo did not his Sistine by religion but to make a novel there. And it was the same for every painter and every artist, moral that's come later. It comes maybe in your work, but not voluntarily. That's the question.

[APPLAUSE]

Is there a question over in this part of the audience? Here is one up forward.

I'd like to ask Mr. West and Mr. Ellison why they think the novel isn't being sold and read today and whether it is because the novels are so sad, or because the novels are so sad, because people aren't buying them anymore.

I don't remember ever having said that people weren't buying novels or reading them. That must be somebody else, I think. They are, so far as bulk is concerned, reading, I think, more than they ever did before. There's a literate public which never existed before, which I don't think has much use for novels, which has a great bulk of literature supplied to it, which is rather overwhelming in comparison to the novel and makes it look as if the novel was less being sold and read less than it was. But I don't-- I think that's an optical illusion and not one which statistics support.

Mr. Ellison, this question was also addressed to you.

Well, some novels aren't being read. Let us put it that way. Most new novels aren't being read. The great successes, I think, are novels which have been made available through the paperback editions. I think that there has been a falling off in the interest in the novel. And it is true.

I think Mr. Sloan could probably substantiate this, that there has been a greater interest in non-fiction recently in terms of new books. Maybe it's because of the crisis, a sense of crisis, which we have now. And perhaps it's because some of the sense of-- the romantic sense of the possibility has gone out of the novels written by most of us younger writers who have just come out of the war and who don't feel too optimistic about things.

But I think it's the nature of man to-- and here, I guess I'm using "man" in that capitalized sense, international and everything. It's his nature to refuse to die. He cannot live with the absurd. He cannot live with chaos. And he, while he might not come to the novel expecting to be shown a pretty picture, he does expect from it that sense of triumph, that sense of struggling and to dominate reality, which can make a tragedy, a tragic action, a very exhilarating experience, simply because by reducing this chaos to an artistic form, we are justified. We are saved somehow.

Thank you, Mr. Ellison. This subject of publication and who's reading novels and who isn't is in great part the subject of tomorrow evening. And I want now to resist the temptation to ask Mr. Sloan to speak of it now, and we'll call this a fortunate transition to tomorrow's evening and adjourn at this point.

[APPLAUSE]