Today we have a talk again to start the discussion. The speaker today has very kindly cooperated with a suggestion from the administrative staff and from myself that, because the session so far has been so extremely mannerly in the way that I take questions yesterday, please, even Mr. Trilling, we thought it was time here at the end, so that any fights that started wouldn't last too long, well, for us to urge someone to take off the gloves or abandon at least the Marquess of Queensbury rules.

Today our speaker is Mr. Holthusen, who is a poet and critic from Germany who is a member of the international seminar this summer. And he is going to talk to the general subject that we have been dealing with in the conference. Mr. Holthusen Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Campbell and Mr. Collins asked me, by all means, to say something provocative. It did not matter what I said. It mattered only that it should be provocative and that it should have at least something to do with the situation of the novel in our time.

Since I could not say no, I decided to consider the novel conference as like a so-called highly GERMAN as the inquiry which precedes canonization and in whose proceedings someone has to play the advocatus diaboli in order to advance against the candidate everything imaginable. I should like to be considered as this advocatus diaboli. And if your breast swells with wrath and indignation, I should ask you to remember that my function is a dialectical one.

I myself am not quite convinced that the novel as a genre is finished or no longer possible in the sense that one might say, for example, that in the 18th century, a great theology had become impossible. But I should like to advance a few arguments on the side of this judgment.

I should like not for a moment losing sight of the reticence implied in my role of advocatus diaboli to maintain that the novel is not, as is claimed by so many literary critics and above all of course by the novelists, the most significant and important form of literary expression, that we live, as it were, in the age of the novel. That, as I have already said, is merely an act of provocation and a question. At bottom, I am convinced that the novel will emerge victorious from its trial and that the College of Cardinals represented, in this case, ladies and gentlemen, by yourselves will triumph over the advocatus diaboli since we are in a country in which the novel still appears to be in full bloom.

I should take as my starting point the simple fact that, among the writers of the first rank in my country, it is impossible to name a single novelist. In making this remark, I do not wish to make an issue of the two grand old men of the German novel, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Both of them have been living abroad for decades and are quite out of touch with the most recent developments in our country. And both reached their zenith in the Roaring '20s, more or less at the same time as the great masterpieces of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka.

Within the secret of literary activity inside Germany at any rate, the novel does not play a leading role. Of course, there is the normal crowd of prolific and successful writers of novels. But scarcely one of them is capable of prompting in me the feeling to NON-ENGLISH . Scarcely one can affect me in the very center of my consciousness in the same way in which I am affected when I read Rilke, or Auden, or Kafka, or Valery, Most of these novelists are honorable but unstimulating, seem to exist only to satisfy a kind of Arabian night complex. That is the eternal desire of a fanciful public for exciting and touching stories.

One never reads them without a certain feeling of impatience and, for the most part, with a slight admixture of bad conscience, as if one were stuffing into oneself too much ice cream. This could suggest the suspicion that the novel itself-- that there was something amiss with the novel itself quite apart from the lack of promising new talent. But there is much to suggest that the impulse to expression among writers of the first rank no longer desires or is no longer able to use the novel form.

The experience of the war, for example, the most important theme by far of the younger generation, has so far produced no first rate novel. The best work that has been written about the war has appeared in the form of lyric poetry or personal diaries. It seems as if the impulse to our truth on the part of the writer had suppressed the principle of fiction or we're no longer willing to place confidence in it, as if his emotional intensity shrank from the complication of a plot.

The question is, can one convey the sense of situation and the consciousness of reality of modern men in a novel plot? Does there exist at all in our life significant relationship, starting points, climaxes, and above all conclusions? And if no such things exist, why should one, in the development of a novel, introduce make believe equivalents?

It is not a new question. Answers of genius have already been given to it by Kafka, Joyce, and Proust. But it is a question which emerges in you today and perhaps in a more radical fashion than ever before. I further believe that the historical situation in which we are living, or rather the historical experiences through which we have lived, are peculiarly adapted to disencourage an inventor of stories.

Must we not confess that we have understood and mastered almost nothing that we have seen with our own eyes, that our imagination does not stretch to cope with the stormy and barbaric history of the 20th century whose witnesses we are? Is the power of the factual and the actual not so overwhelmingly great that the imagination of the artist has no chance?

What is left for us but objectively to document and coolly to reflect on what we have seen? What is left for us apart from the reportage, or in the diary, or, if you will forgive someone who has published a couple of volumes of verse and has had the good fortune to arouse some interest in a handful of readers, or the poem.

The poem is an essence and crystallization of a complex moment of living. The poem as an expressive abbreviation and summar of 20 novel plots. I believe that there exists between the lyrical mode of expression and a reflective prose a certain relationship and I believe that it is characteristic of the spiritual situation of our time that we should find in a whole series of authors of the first or of representative rank in quite distinct countries of our civilization a fruitful combination of lyrical and reflective gifts.

I think, for example, of TS Eliot, of Paul Valéry of Auden, and of Germans like Gottfried Benn and Alexander Schroeder. It is hard to define what the essay has in common with the poem. But I hope that you will agree with me when I say that, in both forms, we find a high degree of stylistic or linguistic density and intellectual tension which distinguishes them from the novel or at least from the classical novel.

In the essay, as in the poem, the author renounces the purely material, more or less cause tension of an invented plot, in favor of the more subtle tension which exists between a constellation of intellectual points and stylistic inflections. The imagination of the author outsource the broad hunting grounds of narrative detail and focuses on decisive points in the evolution of a human consciousness. The imagination is no longer concerned with inventing and relating but with understanding and evoking. It is concerned with the question, "what is the situation of man?"

But has this not always been the concern-- always been at an all times being the concern of all art and all literature? Of course. But in the situation of which the modern artist has to speak, the problem of the human condition has become, in a special and acute sense, critical. The questioning by men of man's own nature has become peculiarly urgent.

A trend which is common to many of the leading writers of modern literature seems to be the remarkable radicalisation of the questions raised. That is to say the rejection and overthrow of the received and, to our way of thinking, somewhat naive frame of consciousness of our fathers and the questioning of being at all. The word existential occurs to me here, the much abused catchword of our age.

The new word, as Ben puts it, that has been there for a few years and which is certainly the most important expression of an inward transformation. It withdraws the emphasis of the ego from the domain of psychology and of INAUDIBLE into the generic, the dark, the concentrated, the core. In such words, I believe we have the evidence of a new situation on which men knows with certainty only the point of the reductibility of mere existence while all else has been lost. The unquestioning scenes of a sense of reality, which went without saying for our fathers, the intelligible world, the doorway to the world, as Rilke puts it, has disappeared from view. The writer asks questions about the very possibility of being. And reality itself has become a problem.

When Shakespeare begins his 18th sonnet with the line, "shall I compare thee to a summer's day," or Sir Philip Sidney his Arcadia with, "you goatherd gods that love the grassy mountains, you nymphs that haunt the spring and pleasant valleys," the situation, the self, and the objects of the world, or the mythological background, all belong to a world of experience given, valid, and common to all.

The modern poet, however, knows no given situation, no unquestioning repose in fate. What he sings is mere naked being that lives behind the slings and arrows of fortune, mere being alive. In Rilke's conclusion of the ninth Duino elegy, for example the climax of a very great poem, SPEAKING GERMAN, "Behold, I live." All definable situations are left behind for what is here asserted and secured is the consciousness of reality as such.

And when in the fifth elegy he speaks of the cheap winter heads of fate, the cheap winter hats of fate, the SPEAKING GERMAN , Rilke is describing fate as a curiously distorting and misleading attribute of the being of man seen through the ironical perspective of consciousness that is without a local habitation and a name. To use a metaphor from modern mathematics, it may be said that this consciousness has, as it were, left the Euclidean space of classical poetry and assumed a non-Euclidean vantage point from which being and reality are no longer unquestionably assured, and given but merely possible, and from which feeling must fight for being in reality and gain and secure them afresh in every new poem.

This new non-Euclidean perspective, which appears, for example, in Rilke, is by no means a unique case. We find similar discoveries in Eliot, in Valery, and others. The classical poet is concerned, so to speak, with objects in being.

The modern poet ponders over the mere existence of being. He looks at himself and is shocked by the fact of his mere incarnation. He has found a new sense of wonder and, in this amazement, a new dimension of senses is revealed to him. But if we are to ascribe to this new sense of being on a certain level of distinction, as certain if not an absolute general value, then the prospects of the novel may well appear slight.

Existential, is the death blow of the novel. Existential is the NON-ENGLISH, says Benn in one of his recent prose works, a bold, radical, a daring but inspired sentence, which gave me the courage in the first place to play the advocatus diaboli among you.

But who is Benn, you may ask, to dare to say such a thing. Let me repeat, if I may, a few remarks that I made a fortnight ago in a talk on German literature of the present day. Benn is today recognized in Germany as the most outstanding lyrical poet indeed with Ernstuner and Bear Brecht as one of the most important of the German writers.

His work is a swan song of the great expressionistic generation. His theme is the tension between a heavily emotionally charged biological outlook on the one hand and an icy intellectualism on the other. On the one hand, the welling up of creation, the phallic, the urgent, the European yearning for escape to the South Seas, the drunken flood of precocious conditions.

On the other hand, the biting negative, which intellect opposes to nature. His prose, which is for the time being more interesting for us as his poetry, is the most individual mixture imaginable of reflective narrative and descriptive elements. It is a style of expressive evocation which shatters the syntactical unity and juxtaposes the fragments in a haunting jazz rhythm, a style which uses scientific and philosophical language but which also includes echoes of technical and military terminology, as well as the language of art and literary criticism, and of INAUDIBLE , and Civil Service German, and of course slang from the Berlin gutter.

It is a style of the city which offers its objective correlative to the world of technological civilization in which we live, lit up by flashes of irony, of parody and cynicism, incredibly precise and at the same time rhapsodic, lyrical, and, on the whole, peculiarly moving. Whenever the withering and robust cynicism of the author brings forth its most fantastic flowers, there are to be find the most wonderful of cadenzas, the most ravishing poetry.

Benn's prose is, as far as I see it, a unique attempt to produce purely poetic effects with purely prosaic means. He does it by achieving the maximum of density of subject matters and careful calculation of rhythm.

It is an attempt to overcome the classical narrative principle of the mere addition, the naive and then, and then, of the traditional epic, and thus to resolve the problem of an absolute prose, a prose, that is to say, what is no longer simply communication but pure poetry, which has rejected time and syntax and all idea of coherence within a plot, and which emerges directly from the voiceless depths of the soul, like a poem. A prose beyond space and time as the author puts it, built up in the world of mere imagination projected on an even plane of the momentary. Its counterpart is typology and evolution.

You see Benn is seeking an absolute expression, a world of expression, an GERMAN , which can endure in the senseless circle of time. He seeks a world of expression, I repeat GERMAN, in the place of a world of history, for history for him is a chaos of blood and nonsense, a senseless circle of agonizing vacuities.

The only reality in which he believes is the work of art. It is his answer to the form demanding power of nothingness, a phenomenon beyond space, and time, and history, stone, verse, sound of the flute. Thus he affirms Andre Moro's vision that the answer of mankind to the gods on the day of judgment will be a people of statues. I repeat the answer of mankind to the gods on the day of judgment will be a people of statues.

For Benn, the enemy is a novel. The enemy is psychology. The enemy is evolution, the servitude of time and syntax, all these inevitable attributes of the classical novel which, in his opinion, must be overthrown in order to make way for new truths and new expression. But psychology was likewise the enemy for Kafka. Psychology, for the last time, this eruption is to be found in his diary. Kafka transformed the novel form into a means of expression of an existential ontological consciousness no longer concerned with psychology. His theme is the mere existence of man caught up in being.

His figures are no longer characters with subtle psychological ramifications. They are colorless, anonymous. They are called simple K only with the letter K, surveyor K or chief clerk K. They are not characters but puppets in the game of metaphysical thought. They are the geometrical position from which the metaphysical quant and paradoxes can be read. It would be possible, in addition to this, to show that as early as Proust, the dimension of time is suspended.

His La Recherche du Temps Perdu is the heroic attempt through the artistic evocation of time experienced to reach, as it were, a point behind time, like the celebrated ape reaching behind the mirror. But what time is we cannot finally find. One can only apprehend it by a mystic illumination.

This happens when Proust in the last volume of his novels, Le Temps Retrouvé, perceives intuitively the secret of remembrance in the tactile experience of a minute irregularity between paving stones in a Venetian church and thus finds the difference between time and past, time past and time present, suspended. In this way, he reaches a position beyond the time from which the passage of time no longer exists. And so you see, ladies and gentlemen, that it looks as if the advocatus diaboli had contradicted himself by speaking of a novel which is the negation of the novel.

Permit me just a few more remarks. Kafka, Proust, Ulysses are 30 years behind us. And what has happened since then that is really new? I confess that I am a fervent admirer of the American novel and that, like many Europeans, I have for years been a victim of Hemingway and Faulkner. I won't say a victim of Henry James. But is America not an exception?

I believe that the flourishing of the American novel is related to the following factors, very superficially-- the youthfulness of American civilization, its historical ascendancy, the integrity of its society. The problem of the novel seems to me to show that American civilization is in a different phase of its development than that of Europe. For Germany, at any rate, this seems to me to be true. And the judgment of Benn, NON-ENGLISH SPEECH, existential that is the death blow of the novel, does mean something, even if it is not to be taken seriously except as in provocation.

APPLAUSE

Mr. O'Connor.

I've taken so many notes in the last 20 minutes that I don't know whether I'll be able to follow them. The last speaker referred to the fact that the novel doesn't flourish in Germany today. All I would say is what I've already said to my class. It never has flourished in Germany.

The novel has never been a German art in spite of Thomas Mann. And even in Thomas Mann, you get the work of a man who is really a philosopher and essayist rather than a novelist, who just does not have the plastic imagination of a novelist, the thing which first and foremost makes the novelist.

I was horrified at his picture of a German reader slinking away with a copy of Proust or INAUDIBLE, speaking of bad functions about reading a novel. But that also is not a very new thing. You get a wonderful description in Pride and Prejudice of Mr. Collins, who agrees to read to the company, until he realizes that what they want to hear is a novel and then he respectfully declines as a novel is something that no serious man will read.

I don't really believe a statement that there are no further significant relationships in life. How can we live in with such a belief? How can we believe that our relationships with our friends and with the people we love are not significant relationships?

Tomorrow I have to speak of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's great novel about his own relationship to his mother. Is anybody going to tell me that is not a significant relationship or that relationship does not continue and will not continue all through history? I don't believe it.

The whole description we got of the imaginative position of the poet, the difficulties he had, the relations of his work to the essayist, reminded me of that wonderful poem of Yeats. He was exasperated by a passage in Thomas Mann. It really maddened him. Thomas Mann says, in our time, the destiny of man is reflected in politics.

And Yeats got very cross with them as you would expect Yeats to go. And then he wrote that wonderful poem which begins, "How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fixed on Russian, or on Chinese, or on Spanish politics," the one that ends up, "And there is a man who knows the truth of war, and war's alarms, but oh that I were young again and held her in my arms." Not, of course, a significant relationship.

Now also I don't really believe that our forefathers had a naive form of consciousness. I don't like the idea of those simple-minded people Aristotle and Plato dismissed in this lofty way. I still think they have something to say. And I still think the historical tradition of literature has a great deal to say. I don't believe there is anything really in common between the poem and the essay. And if modern poetry has reached the point where it's difficult, according to the speaker, to see what the two have in common, all I can say is they never had anything in common.

Poetry is still what it always was. It's a song more than anything else. The speaker, having told us the staggering news, that existentialism was the death blow of the novel, then asked a rhetorical question who is Benn, to, which I only want to reply, what is existentialism? What is existentialism to say that we should say it's the death blow of the novel?

Also, this feeling that the only reality is the work of art has already been dealt with by Proust. And it's part of the objective quality of our time that Proust really could believe that there is no objective reality. The only reality that exists is the work of art. And I don't believe that either. I still think that naive and Euclidean man Aristotle has quite a lot to say on the subject. And I think it ought to be listened to.

One of our difficulties in this discussion from the very beginning has been the fact that we never have done what any decent Aristotelian would have done straight away to define our terms. We've been talking about things which have absolutely nothing in common. We listen to a discussion of the novels of Kafka.

I've already pointed out that the novels of Kafka are not novels. We've been told that the characters in this novel are simply described as Mr. K, or Surveyor so-and-so, but that sort of thing was done long ago by the man whom Kafka most resembles, John INAUDIBLE.

Christian is the same thing as Mr. K, and it's perfectly obvious that The Trial and The Castle are not novels. They are allegories, and you have to read them as allegories. Otherwise you're not reading them at all.

There are a number of other things which INAUDIBLE got me excited about. One of these days when somebody talks about the youthfulness of American civilization, I'm going to fling something. I mean, this is really, I think, completely untrue. This country we're in is a very old country with a very old tradition. And anybody who approaches American literature under the assumption that it's naive and unsophisticated ought to turn and read some of the New England writers. And should change, shall I say, from paying too much attention to Mr. T.S. Eliot and read a little Robert Frost to see what a simple American mind is like.

APPLAUSE

Mr. Holthusen, would you speak to Mr. O'Connor's--

I only can say that I agree. I agree with you on the-- all the line, you know?

LAUGHTER

Yeah, you are-- you don't forget that I played a dialectical role. And I know that what you mean, and I'm convinced that the position of men is always the crossroads of the immutability and the mutability of men. But in this case, if you had given this lecture-- I had said the same thing as you said, you see. In this case I wanted to stress certain shocks of consciousness which has-- which have occurred between say-- let's say 1900 and today.

And I think that there are certain-- certain mutations in consciousness, and that men can be interpreted as a modern man, as a creature which-- which confronts a completely new situation. I am not-- I'm not an existentialist, and in Germany I always fight existentialism, you see. And all that you say is just to write a complement to what I wanted to say. And I'm not quite convinced that the novel is finished. And I am convinced that if there is a genius who-- who comes-- who is given to us, he will write a new novel. And they write novels, you know. There are men-- there are men who write novels. But it is only to make clear one point and from this corner-- this German corner.

I don't think, by the way, that Germany is completely ungifted to write novels. I think of INAUDIBLE , for example. INAUDIBLE. And I think of Stifter and Fontane, and perhaps Thomas Mann. But there are--

LAUGHTER

Yes.

I'm entirely disarmed.

Mr. West, do you have any comment on this subject?

I suppose one of the disintegrated factors that blow the novel apart is supposed to be the new consciousness of personality you get from Freud. And it impresses me enormously how much this is not so. I suppose the most naive area of the European cultural zone is Iceland, and the saga of Grettir the Strong is, I suppose, an early modern European piece of literature as there is around. And the opening situation of that is the conflict between Grettir and his father.

Grettir hates his father very much, and he has good reason to. His father won't give him a sword, and he resents that very bitterly. And his mother provides him-- secretly provides him with the sword. INAUDIBLE makes up the poem. And, after all, the mother is a friend of the man. And this uses an entirely Freudian symbol in an entirely conscious way. It seems to me to show how old that consciousness is of the personality which we treat with such great novelty.

And the end of Grettir the Strong is Grettir is killed by the sword which he's lived by. His brother has to avenge him. It's the social countant that demands this. The blood price is that he should kill the man who killed his brother. It's a social situation that pushes him into carrying a burden of guilt. He has to become a murderer. The only way he can fulfill his social destiny is by taking this burden of guilt on.

Then he is taken up by the community, which is outraged. And the people who condemn him, they say quite simply-- they think they're being very humane and very liberal. We only ask one price for a man's life, and that is a man's life. The INAUDIBLE, who has avenged his brother, is then taken to-- put in a prison and put in a prison cell. And the penalty is not exactly-- it's very violent form. All he has to do is wait till the time he dies. And there is a man there who is in the same position, who is waiting for death too.

Thorstein and the man-- it's a cold and filthy place with no escape from it. And this man is very downcast. Thorstein is a poet, his function is to sing the story of what brought them into the prison cell to make the prison cell tolerable. And to sing until the end comes. It seems exactly the same consciousness of the human destiny which we have now. The inescapable trap, the burden of guilt becomes removed from ourselves. We have to live with it. There is nothing new about this. Why should it disintegrate a very satisfactory and good art form? I cannot see it.

APPLAUSE

Any other members of the panel who want to speak to this subject? Mr. Simenon, will you say anything?

INAUDIBLE

Mr. Ellison? Mr. Frohock?

They'll pass.

Mr. Lytle, please.

Please?

Yes. Pretty please.

Well, I have nothing further to say to this subject, but I might if momentarily discuss it if I may, deliberately and consciously so. We haven't necessarily defined our terms. And I'm certainly not going to at this late date set about it, but I would like to make one or two distinctions, and I would like to distinguish between the storytelling habit in me which is continuous and universal, and the story as a novel. And I would like to, in consideration, say these two things.

First, it is-- you've got to learn to master a certain kind of technique. And I will specify. And I think we got this deliberately from Flaubert, that he used for the first time the five senses as a medium by which you could enter the human consciousness. It had always been done more or less, but from him we learned to do that consciously. And that's a great gain.

I think with-- not the formalist of art but for those who consider form as the final meaning of art, that you have got to have and fix finally somewhere before you get down your point of view, finally, because everything is related through that. And then I'm not going to bore you with various other things, such as the sea and when to use panorama. But I want to say this, that when you start out, if you have beforehand a thorough plotted direction, or rather a blueprint before the thing has begun, that you're going to get the best melodrama.

That the creative act is a growth and not an organization, because thing that is organized-- you organize something that is already done, as INAUDIBLE. And that finally it is a growth, and that you try to control that growth towards some end. And in that process, you commit your life. That is, that you commit what in you is extremely, to the fullest extent, as James says, if I may be allowed to quote him too, that a man--

LAUGHTER

--that our nation has to undertake the most difficult thing possible to be done. And that's why the artist and the priest and the soldier die every day. It is at full and complete commitment of yourself. And you take the risk of failure, which to a man is the risk of emasculation. And that's what I mean by that total commitment.

And if you don't believe me, what is a hack writer, a shyster lawyer? What is the other one? They are men who don't take themselves seriously. They don't make that full commitment, and therefore they're a comic figure. And of course-- and that is finally a man's definition of his being. With a woman, it's love. That's why INAUDIBLE is the-- describes the fall of the state of woman, is she's so with a man.

Now if I might-- I mean, I think that I consider myself an artist, I consider in the end that I think we've talked too much about-- well I don't know. I got the feeling that the people of the moment who are making and losing readers in large numbers-- I think that's a mistake. I think that art is in the end aristocratic. And I don't mean in-- to use that in political terms.

And I was thinking that the South perhaps has something to offer in this-- in the heart of this concern. And I was thinking that, as we were saying yesterday, that Sinclair Lewis was boring and died before his time, which must have been a terrifying thing for him. But I was thinking if he had only been born in the South, perhaps he would not look so-- INAUDIBLE because the South has been defeated. Therefore, the South knows the nature of the world, that in the end it is always defeat because the South has been defeated. Therefore, the South knows the nature of the world, that in the end it is always defeat.

And what have you got for the artist that can forfend that thing, that thief of work? And it is style. It is mannerisms, which now, as I believe Yeats said again, is in the right of style. And he doesn't have to be manly always in life, but he necessarily does in his work.

And I think the South has that firm man's grip. That's the reason you have so many good writers who've been writing for 30 years, but with modest readers-- modest group of readers. It's because they know that thing, that you have got to have something when you have pushed back against the wall to contain the core of your being so that you can come again.

I would furthermore say this, that the Eastern part of the country now is almost entirely metropolitan, and that the word has become shopworn. That the thing makes the word alive is an image, and that you have to live in some country society where the seasons turn and all country people and all seamen speak in terms of images. And that is a thing with the deliberate shaping and twisting and distorting of words to get something fresh, because there's nothing new under the sun. We know that.

You have the shock in the country, or in a country society, of each day being different from the next. Did you ever hear a farmer who showed any kind of optimism about his crops? No. He doesn't dare, because he'll be tricked by the mysterious powers that rule his field. He's always a pessimist. That means that he also is a religious man, and without some kind of spiritual quality to work-- I mean spiritual quality to an art, it becomes sterile. And it may be very beautiful and glittering, but it has none of that human passion and compassion of which art is made fine.

Now to give you a case in point, I had a tenant. I ran a cotton farm once in my youth, and it was after the First World War. And we at this time were discussing the war debt, which you would think that that was so complicated that certainly nobody would have trained economists to discuss it. And he said this, and notice everything is an image. He said, "Great Britain has got two vaults of our gold and sat down on it and said, now come get it if you can." But I think that that point is to be made.

And so I'm saying that in a society where you think in images, and art if it's anything it's concretely human. And that's why I take absolutely your position on this allegorical business. It leaves out the circumstantiality and the accident that surrounds life, and you get-- and, of course, in its worst form, it's propaganda. Which leads not to the end of an art, which should be-- any art should be defined in its own terms and have its own experience and not to improve the condition of the middle-Western or the far-Western farmer. That's residual, meaning that it's a political matter.

And so I am pleading for an art that is aristocratic, which I think is its nature. And that it should be approached with great humility, else you'll destroy it. And that it must always be concrete, and that there is a great extension.

INAUDIBLE . Now, of course, that we have inherited from people like Flaubert and James, in spite of the fact you don't like him, has given us a great heel. And I confess that there are moments there when I can't read James. I mean, it's too tenuous. Somebody has got to kiss somebody somewhere.

LAUGHTER

Nevertheless, he has given us a great many technical health. And it takes a long time to master that, and you commit your total and whole being to it, and-- which is the risk of failure. And let me see if I've got anything else to say. Well, I think really that's about all.

APPLAUSE

Mr. Ellison?

Well, I would just-- really in agreement with Mr. Lytle. It's just-- I'd just like to say this. As I am a Southwesterner and-- this is beginning to sound like an old-fashioned parent meeting or something. But just a word about language, imagery, and the present moment. I find that as I go around and listen-- and my life is pretty much divided between the races around New York-- I find that so much imagery, what you would expect would be limited to the South and to farm regions, is very much alive within the metropolitan area. It's full of glitter and it takes on new dimensions.

And secondly-- this again ties in I think-- you have in this country such a mixture. Not only of national groupings, racial groupings, dialects, lingoes, terminologies-- technical and scientific-- that we can't help if we are sensitive to it to bring a new life to prose fiction. I think that's one of the things that Faulkner has shown us so much and so well.

Someone asked me the other night why I chose to write in the first person. And they said, well, isn't it because you wanted this to be every man? And I said, yes, but there's a much simpler motive behind it. And that was to be able to move in upon the speech patterns that I find around me. I wanted to exploit the rhetoric, I wanted to exploit the scientific terminology. I wanted to exploit the sermons and-- and the hollers and the slang.

Because I think that in its-- that finding it in a formal pattern gives the reader pleasure. And it certainly gives me some of the pleasure that Mr. O'Connor has been talking about. After all, and this hasn't been said-- I think he's implied it. That the delight that the-- that you get from trying to write a novel comes from the delight in putting up a good yarn, a good lie. I'm a professional liar, and I can't get away from it.

The other thing is this, just-- which I think ties up with this mixture of regional speech. I had a situation in my novel where I wanted to-- to personalize the chaotic flux. And I wanted to create a character, and I said what shall I call this man? And somehow a bell rang in my head, and I remembered a blues which was sung by Jimmy Rushing. And Jimmy Rushing used to sing this thing, and there was a refrain which went something like this. "Reinhart, Reinhart. It's so lonesome up here on Beacon Hill."

LAUGHTER

Now I was simply trying to exploit my own folk background. I don't think that this blues was a product of any folk line. I think it was a product of this mixture that we have in the country right now. But I was very surprised and very-- to discover that the gentleman was dead. But recently I picked up a copy of Time magazine and I discovered that there had actually been a Mr. Reinhart, a former student here at Harvard, and that his tradition was built around him. And it was exactly the call to chaos. "Come out, let's go on a rampage. Let's sail our phonograph records. Let's ride."

And it's exactly-- it was so fitting. I don't know what-- I don't want to be mystical about it, but I just-- I think that not only does speech and does imagery operate here and there, drifting back and forth through social layers, through region, and so forth, but the tendency of the human mind to adopt and find significance in the same symbols is very-- very much a part of this kind of unity. Flux and flow, this bobbing, weaving. This fluidity of American life.

APPLAUSE

Just briefly and parenthetically, Mr. West objected last evening to discussion of the American reality. One of the things being almost touched on today is this question of regionalism, and certainly no one wants the regional novel, but-- of any kind. But in America, this flux and flow is so great that one can try to draw all these languages and dialects and levels together. But it makes for difficulty of communication sometimes.

I'm reminded of a class which read Light in August by Faulkner and rather liked it. But finally, when they were asked-- it was not my class. They were asked what can we-- what bothers you about this, if anything? This was a class in New York City and all of them city students. They said, well, there's only one thing that bothers us. That's on the first page. It's an extremely hot day-- extremely hot day. And this girl, barefooted and very poor, is-- and pregnant is-- and friendless in a way, except that everyone befriends her, is walking along the road in this steaming Mississippi sun and she keeps talking about furs.

And the teacher didn't understand what this was and looked at the text. And the girl keeps saying as she trudges along through this dust-- she keeps almost morbidly repeating it's a fur piece.

LAUGHTER

The-- I don't know whether it was just through lapse or through desire to communicate more fully that later-- when she says this later in the novel, she spells it differently. Spells it conventionally. This may be only a problem in connection with literature being aristocratic. Mr. O'Connor, would you speak to Mr. Lytle's point, briefly or at length, that literature should be aristocratic? Because it's not my understanding, it's just my guess, that you don't think it should be or is.

Well--

Or would you like to define the term?

Very briefly. I don't want to go into this. I very much like when the discussion is thrown open, that we should also take into consideration the German speech yesterday, which for me has been a high point of the conference. He knows that's not mere flattery. And it raised a number of issues which are also being raised, I think, by Mr. Lytle.

The question about literature being aristocratic-- at the moment the thing, the issue isn't there, because it seems to me still, referring back to the German speech yesterday, that we don't seem at all to have decided whether or not we want a reader. And first of all, I want to know what the reader's place in the novel is. I try to follow very carefully the Germans' distinction between the difficulty I found in Ulysses and the difficulty I ought to find in Light in August.

And as I said before, it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. And somewhere or other, we've dropped the reader. And it seems to me the reader is an essential part of the novel. I'm quite prepared to say, very well, you write a novel for 50 million people, you write a novel for a million people, you write a novel a novel for 5,000 people. All I want to know is who is the audience? And the audience necessarily, if it's going to be limited, is going to be aristocratic.

I see no particular reason why it should be as limited as Mr. Lytle seems to imply. When we're talking about the popularity of the 19th century Victorian novel, we don't mean everybody read it. We mean that you had a highly educated middle class, all of whom were prepared to read novels. And you've got an entirely new public. I want to know where you draw the line. When you cut out this new public, what is the public you're addressing? Then I think it would be time to talk about writing for an aristocracy.

First of all, I want to see the audience defined. Again, I'm in precisely the same position in referring to Mr. Lytle's remarks on style. I fancy that he and I are all along the line in complete agreement, but that problem of style is one that's been worrying me. Obviously the style of certain modern novels is not the style of the 19th century novel, which you all think I lament too much.

But again, the question of the reader comes into the problem of style. The question is this as I see it. Is style a relationship as it used to be understood between the writer and the reader? In the work of Joyce and Faulkner, it seems to me that it's a relationship between the author and the object. And I feel once you do that, you start excluding the reader.

I gave a couple of examples of it in class today. The fact that when Stephen Dedalus comes back home after having decided to repent-- when he opens the door there is this wild outburst of meaningless words which represents the upsurge of what Joyce would call the subconscious or the unconscious. Now that's all very well, but this is a relationship between Joyce and the event. It's not a relationship between him and the reader.

The whole problem of the style of Ulysses is contained in this. It's getting closer and closer and closer to the object. We discussed last night Mr. Ellison's novel and the question of if you're describing a hallucinatory state, do you describe it in a hallucinatory prose as Joyce does? The moment you do, you seem to me to be transferring the emphasis of style. To me, style is manner, and manner implies the existence of an audience, the existence of a reader.

It's in literature what manners is in real life. It is the point at which the individual comes out and talks to his neighbor and presents himself to his neighbor in whatever aspect suits him. We know it's not a complete man. It's a pose, if you like, and it seems to me that we've lost this pose. I'd very much like to hear somebody discuss that problem which he also raised, and in which I think again he and I are very much in agreement. That is the relationship between metropolitan and rural art.

One of the things that most has impressed me in modern art is the modern French film. And in the novels of people like Marcel Ayme-- and again, I'm not speaking from flatterer in those novels of Monsieur Simenon which I admire so much-- it seems to me that there is something that's disappeared everywhere else in literature. That is the recognition of the other fellow, the thing that Magre has all the time. The recognition that there's the other man out there.

And it's characteristic of the French film that you get this-- this admiration for somebody who is doing a small, perhaps unimportant job, the delight in him as a character. It's in those two writers principally that I find the continuation of the attitude of respect for life which I find in 19th century literature. And I think that the real reason is that France has still remained a rural country-- very largely a rural country.

And in effect, if you're writing about your own village, you can't get too dirty about the villagers. Because ultimately you have to live with them, and you have to recognize that they're going to come to your funeral anyhow. It's very important that you should have a good funeral. And I think that has been lost in metropolitan art. That sense-- what I call realism-- that the writer is the same sort of person as the person he's writing about.

Mr. Frohock?

Sorry.

Anyone? Any questions from the-- yes, Mr. Simenon.

INAUDIBLE. It's very short.

I think that the conclusion may be that it's no American novel, nor the the French novel or German novels, nor 18th century, 19th century novels. But maybe it's two kind of novels-- only the good and the bad. I think that is the only conclusion after all the discussion.

APPLAUSE

Christian is the same thing as Mr. K, and it's perfectly obvious that The Trial and The Castle are not novels. They are allegories, and you have to read them as allegories. Otherwise you're not reading them at all.

There are a number of other things which INAUDIBLE got me excited about. One of these days when somebody talks about the youthfulness of American civilization, I'm going to fling something. I mean, this is really, I think, completely untrue. This country we're in is a very old country with a very old tradition. And anybody who approaches American literature under the assumption that it's naive and unsophisticated ought to turn and read some of the New England writers. And should change, shall I say, from paying too much attention to Mr. T.S. Eliot and read a little Robert Frost to see what a simple American mind is like.

APPLAUSE

Mr. Holthusen, would you speak to Mr. O'Connor's--

I only can say that I agree. I agree with you on the-- all the line, you know?

LAUGHTER

Yeah, you are-- you don't forget that I played a dialectical role. And I know that what you mean, and I'm convinced that the position of men is always the crossroads of the immutability and the mutability of men. But in this case, if you had given this lecture-- I had said the same thing as you said, you see. In this case I wanted to stress certain shocks of consciousness which has-- which have occurred between say-- let's say 1900 and today.

And I think that there are certain-- certain mutations in consciousness, and that men can be interpreted as a modern man, as a creature which-- which confronts a completely new situation. I am not-- I'm not an existentialist, and in Germany I always fight existentialism, you see. And all that you say is just to write a complement to what I wanted to say. And I'm not quite convinced that the novel is finished. And I am convinced that if there is a genius who-- who comes-- who is given to us, he will write a new novel. And they write novels, you know. There are men-- there are men who write novels. But it is only to make clear one point and from this corner-- this German corner.

I don't think, by the way, that Germany is completely ungifted to write novels. I think of INAUDIBLE , for example. INAUDIBLE. And I think of Stifter and Fontane, and perhaps Thomas Mann. But there are--

LAUGHTER

Yes.

I'm entirely disarmed.

Mr. West, do you have any comment on this subject?

I suppose one of the disintegrated factors that blow the novel apart is supposed to be the new consciousness of personality you get from Freud. And it impresses me enormously how much this is not so. I suppose the most naive area of the European cultural zone is Iceland, and the saga of Grettir the Strong is, I suppose, an early modern European piece of literature as there is around. And the opening situation of that is the conflict between Grettir and his father.

Grettir hates his father very much, and he has good reason to. His father won't give him a sword, and he resents that very bitterly. And his mother provides him-- secretly provides him with the sword. INAUDIBLE makes up the poem. And, after all, the mother is a friend of the man. And this uses an entirely Freudian symbol in an entirely conscious way. It seems to me to show how old that consciousness is of the personality which we treat with such great novelty.

And the end of Grettir the Strong is Grettir is killed by the sword which he's lived by. His brother has to avenge him. It's the social countant that demands this. The blood price is that he should kill the man who killed his brother. It's a social situation that pushes him into carrying a burden of guilt. He has to become a murderer. The only way he can fulfill his social destiny is by taking this burden of guilt on.

Then he is taken up by the community, which is outraged. And the people who condemn him, they say quite simply-- they think they're being very humane and very liberal. We only ask one price for a man's life, and that is a man's life. The INAUDIBLE, who has avenged his brother, is then taken to-- put in a prison and put in a prison cell. And the penalty is not exactly-- it's very violent form. All he has to do is wait till the time he dies. And there is a man there who is in the same position, who is waiting for death too.

Thorstein and the man-- it's a cold and filthy place with no escape from it. And this man is very downcast. Thorstein is a poet, his function is to sing the story of what brought them into the prison cell to make the prison cell tolerable. And to sing until the end comes. It seems exactly the same consciousness of the human destiny which we have now. The inescapable trap, the burden of guilt becomes removed from ourselves. We have to live with it. There is nothing new about this. Why should it disintegrate a very satisfactory and good art form? I cannot see it.

APPLAUSE

Any other members of the panel who want to speak to this subject? Mr. Simenon, will you say anything?

INAUDIBLE

Mr. Ellison? Mr. Frohock?

They'll pass.

Mr. Lytle, please.

Please?

Yes. Pretty please.

Well, I have nothing further to say to this subject, but I might if momentarily discuss it if I may, deliberately and consciously so. We haven't necessarily defined our terms. And I'm certainly not going to at this late date set about it, but I would like to make one or two distinctions, and I would like to distinguish between the storytelling habit in me which is continuous and universal, and the story as a novel. And I would like to, in consideration, say these two things.

First, it is-- you've got to learn to master a certain kind of technique. And I will specify. And I think we got this deliberately from Flaubert, that he used for the first time the five senses as a medium by which you could enter the human consciousness. It had always been done more or less, but from him we learned to do that consciously. And that's a great gain.

I think with-- not the formalist of art but for those who consider form as the final meaning of art, that you have got to have and fix finally somewhere before you get down your point of view, finally, because everything is related through that. And then I'm not going to bore you with various other things, such as the sea and when to use panorama. But I want to say this, that when you start out, if you have beforehand a thorough plotted direction, or rather a blueprint before the thing has begun, that you're going to get the best melodrama.

That the creative act is a growth and not an organization, because thing that is organized-- you organize something that is already done, as INAUDIBLE. And that finally it is a growth, and that you try to control that growth towards some end. And in that process, you commit your life. That is, that you commit what in you is extremely, to the fullest extent, as James says, if I may be allowed to quote him too, that a man--

LAUGHTER

--that our nation has to undertake the most difficult thing possible to be done. And that's why the artist and the priest and the soldier die every day. It is at full and complete commitment of yourself. And you take the risk of failure, which to a man is the risk of emasculation. And that's what I mean by that total commitment.

And if you don't believe me, what is a hack writer, a shyster lawyer? What is the other one? They are men who don't take themselves seriously. They don't make that full commitment, and therefore they're a comic figure. And of course-- and that is finally a man's definition of his being. With a woman, it's love. That's why INAUDIBLE is the-- describes the fall of the state of woman, is she's so with a man.

Now if I might-- I mean, I think that I consider myself an artist, I consider in the end that I think we've talked too much about-- well I don't know. I got the feeling that the people of the moment who are making and losing readers in large numbers-- I think that's a mistake. I think that art is in the end aristocratic. And I don't mean in-- to use that in political terms.

And I was thinking that the South perhaps has something to offer in this-- in the heart of this concern. And I was thinking that, as we were saying yesterday, that Sinclair Lewis was boring and died before his time, which must have been a terrifying thing for him. But I was thinking if he had only been born in the South, perhaps he would not look so-- INAUDIBLE because the South has been defeated. Therefore, the South knows the nature of the world, that in the end it is always defeat because the South has been defeated. Therefore, the South knows the nature of the world, that in the end it is always defeat.

And what have you got for the artist that can forfend that thing, that thief of work? And it is style. It is mannerisms, which now, as I believe Yeats said again, is in the right of style. And he doesn't have to be manly always in life, but he necessarily does in his work.

And I think the South has that firm man's grip. That's the reason you have so many good writers who've been writing for 30 years, but with modest readers-- modest group of readers. It's because they know that thing, that you have got to have something when you have pushed back against the wall to contain the core of your being so that you can come again.

I would furthermore say this, that the Eastern part of the country now is almost entirely metropolitan, and that the word has become shopworn. That the thing makes the word alive is an image, and that you have to live in some country society where the seasons turn and all country people and all seamen speak in terms of images. And that is a thing with the deliberate shaping and twisting and distorting of words to get something fresh, because there's nothing new under the sun. We know that.

You have the shock in the country, or in a country society, of each day being different from the next. Did you ever hear a farmer who showed any kind of optimism about his crops? No. He doesn't dare, because he'll be tricked by the mysterious powers that rule his field. He's always a pessimist. That means that he also is a religious man, and without some kind of spiritual quality to work-- I mean spiritual quality to an art, it becomes sterile. And it may be very beautiful and glittering, but it has none of that human passion and compassion of which art is made fine.

Now to give you a case in point, I had a tenant. I ran a cotton farm once in my youth, and it was after the First World War. And we at this time were discussing the war debt, which you would think that that was so complicated that certainly nobody would have trained economists to discuss it. And he said this, and notice everything is an image. He said, "Great Britain has got two vaults of our gold and sat down on it and said, now come get it if you can." But I think that that point is to be made.

And so I'm saying that in a society where you think in images, and art if it's anything it's concretely human. And that's why I take absolutely your position on this allegorical business. It leaves out the circumstantiality and the accident that surrounds life, and you get-- and, of course, in its worst form, it's propaganda. Which leads not to the end of an art, which should be-- any art should be defined in its own terms and have its own experience and not to improve the condition of the middle-Western or the far-Western farmer. That's residual, meaning that it's a political matter.

And so I am pleading for an art that is aristocratic, which I think is its nature. And that it should be approached with great humility, else you'll destroy it. And that it must always be concrete, and that there is a great extension.

INAUDIBLE . Now, of course, that we have inherited from people like Flaubert and James, in spite of the fact you don't like him, has given us a great heel. And I confess that there are moments there when I can't read James. I mean, it's too tenuous. Somebody has got to kiss somebody somewhere.

LAUGHTER

Nevertheless, he has given us a great many technical health. And it takes a long time to master that, and you commit your total and whole being to it, and-- which is the risk of failure. And let me see if I've got anything else to say. Well, I think really that's about all.

APPLAUSE

Mr. Ellison?

Well, I would just-- really in agreement with Mr. Lytle. It's just-- I'd just like to say this. As I am a Southwesterner and-- this is beginning to sound like an old-fashioned parent meeting or something. But just a word about language, imagery, and the present moment. I find that as I go around and listen-- and my life is pretty much divided between the races around New York-- I find that so much imagery, what you would expect would be limited to the South and to farm regions, is very much alive within the metropolitan area. It's full of glitter and it takes on new dimensions.

And secondly-- this again ties in I think-- you have in this country such a mixture. Not only of national groupings, racial groupings, dialects, lingoes, terminologies-- technical and scientific-- that we can't help if we are sensitive to it to bring a new life to prose fiction. I think that's one of the things that Faulkner has shown us so much and so well.

Someone asked me the other night why I chose to write in the first person. And they said, well, isn't it because you wanted this to be every man? And I said, yes, but there's a much simpler motive behind it. And that was to be able to move in upon the speech patterns that I find around me. I wanted to exploit the rhetoric, I wanted to exploit the scientific terminology. I wanted to exploit the sermons and-- and the hollers and the slang.

Because I think that in its-- that finding it in a formal pattern gives the reader pleasure. And it certainly gives me some of the pleasure that Mr. O'Connor has been talking about. After all, and this hasn't been said-- I think he's implied it. That the delight that the-- that you get from trying to write a novel comes from the delight in putting up a good yarn, a good lie. I'm a professional liar, and I can't get away from it.

The other thing is this, just-- which I think ties up with this mixture of regional speech. I had a situation in my novel where I wanted to-- to personalize the chaotic flux. And I wanted to create a character, and I said what shall I call this man? And somehow a bell rang in my head, and I remembered a blues which was sung by Jimmy Rushing. And Jimmy Rushing used to sing this thing, and there was a refrain which went something like this. "Reinhart, Reinhart. It's so lonesome up here on Beacon Hill."

LAUGHTER

Now I was simply trying to exploit my own folk background. I don't think that this blues was a product of any folk line. I think it was a product of this mixture that we have in the country right now. But I was very surprised and very-- to discover that the gentleman was dead. But recently I picked up a copy of Time magazine and I discovered that there had actually been a Mr. Reinhart, a former student here at Harvard, and that his tradition was built around him. And it was exactly the call to chaos. "Come out, let's go on a rampage. Let's sail our phonograph records. Let's ride."

And it's exactly-- it was so fitting. I don't know what-- I don't want to be mystical about it, but I just-- I think that not only does speech and does imagery operate here and there, drifting back and forth through social layers, through region, and so forth, but the tendency of the human mind to adopt and find significance in the same symbols is very-- very much a part of this kind of unity. Flux and flow, this bobbing, weaving. This fluidity of American life.

APPLAUSE

Just briefly and parenthetically, Mr. West objected last evening to discussion of the American reality. One of the things being almost touched on today is this question of regionalism, and certainly no one wants the regional novel, but-- of any kind. But in America, this flux and flow is so great that one can try to draw all these languages and dialects and levels together. But it makes for difficulty of communication sometimes.

I'm reminded of a class which read Light in August by Faulkner and rather liked it. But finally, when they were asked-- it was not my class. They were asked what can we-- what bothers you about this, if anything? This was a class in New York City and all of them city students. They said, well, there's only one thing that bothers us. That's on the first page. It's an extremely hot day-- extremely hot day. And this girl, barefooted and very poor, is-- and pregnant is-- and friendless in a way, except that everyone befriends her, is walking along the road in this steaming Mississippi sun and she keeps talking about furs.

And the teacher didn't understand what this was and looked at the text. And the girl keeps saying as she trudges along through this dust-- she keeps almost morbidly repeating it's a fur piece.

LAUGHTER

The-- I don't know whether it was just through lapse or through desire to communicate more fully that later-- when she says this later in the novel, she spells it differently. Spells it conventionally. This may be only a problem in connection with literature being aristocratic. Mr. O'Connor, would you speak to Mr. Lytle's point, briefly or at length, that literature should be aristocratic? Because it's not my understanding, it's just my guess, that you don't think it should be or is.

Well--

Or would you like to define the term?

Very briefly. I don't want to go into this. I very much like when the discussion is thrown open, that we should also take into consideration the German speech yesterday, which for me has been a high point of the conference. He knows that's not mere flattery. And it raised a number of issues which are also being raised, I think, by Mr. Lytle.

The question about literature being aristocratic-- at the moment the thing, the issue isn't there, because it seems to me still, referring back to the German speech yesterday, that we don't seem at all to have decided whether or not we want a reader. And first of all, I want to know what the reader's place in the novel is. I try to follow very carefully the Germans' distinction between the difficulty I found in Ulysses and the difficulty I ought to find in Light in August.

And as I said before, it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. And somewhere or other, we've dropped the reader. And it seems to me the reader is an essential part of the novel. I'm quite prepared to say, very well, you write a novel for 50 million people, you write a novel for a million people, you write a novel a novel for 5,000 people. All I want to know is who is the audience? And the audience necessarily, if it's going to be limited, is going to be aristocratic.

I see no particular reason why it should be as limited as Mr. Lytle seems to imply. When we're talking about the popularity of the 19th century Victorian novel, we don't mean everybody read it. We mean that you had a highly educated middle class, all of whom were prepared to read novels. And you've got an entirely new public. I want to know where you draw the line. When you cut out this new public, what is the public you're addressing? Then I think it would be time to talk about writing for an aristocracy.

First of all, I want to see the audience defined. Again, I'm in precisely the same position in referring to Mr. Lytle's remarks on style. I fancy that he and I are all along the line in complete agreement, but that problem of style is one that's been worrying me. Obviously the style of certain modern novels is not the style of the 19th century novel, which you all think I lament too much.

But again, the question of the reader comes into the problem of style. The question is this as I see it. Is style a relationship as it used to be understood between the writer and the reader? In the work of Joyce and Faulkner, it seems to me that it's a relationship between the author and the object. And I feel once you do that, you start excluding the reader.

I gave a couple of examples of it in class today. The fact that when Stephen Dedalus comes back home after having decided to repent-- when he opens the door there is this wild outburst of meaningless words which represents the upsurge of what Joyce would call the subconscious or the unconscious. Now that's all very well, but this is a relationship between Joyce and the event. It's not a relationship between him and the reader.

The whole problem of the style of Ulysses is contained in this. It's getting closer and closer and closer to the object. We discussed last night Mr. Ellison's novel and the question of if you're describing a hallucinatory state, do you describe it in a hallucinatory prose as Joyce does? The moment you do, you seem to me to be transferring the emphasis of style. To me, style is manner, and manner implies the existence of an audience, the existence of a reader.

It's in literature what manners is in real life. It is the point at which the individual comes out and talks to his neighbor and presents himself to his neighbor in whatever aspect suits him. We know it's not a complete man. It's a pose, if you like, and it seems to me that we've lost this pose. I'd very much like to hear somebody discuss that problem which he also raised, and in which I think again he and I are very much in agreement. That is the relationship between metropolitan and rural art.

One of the things that most has impressed me in modern art is the modern French film. And in the novels of people like Marcel Ayme-- and again, I'm not speaking from flatterer in those novels of Monsieur Simenon which I admire so much-- it seems to me that there is something that's disappeared everywhere else in literature. That is the recognition of the other fellow, the thing that Magre has all the time. The recognition that there's the other man out there.

And it's characteristic of the French film that you get this-- this admiration for somebody who is doing a small, perhaps unimportant job, the delight in him as a character. It's in those two writers principally that I find the continuation of the attitude of respect for life which I find in 19th century literature. And I think that the real reason is that France has still remained a rural country-- very largely a rural country.

And in effect, if you're writing about your own village, you can't get too dirty about the villagers. Because ultimately you have to live with them, and you have to recognize that they're going to come to your funeral anyhow. It's very important that you should have a good funeral. And I think that has been lost in metropolitan art. That sense-- what I call realism-- that the writer is the same sort of person as the person he's writing about.

Mr. Frohock?

Sorry.

Anyone? Any questions from the-- yes, Mr. Simenon.

INAUDIBLE. It's very short.

I think that the conclusion may be that it's no American novel, nor the the French novel or German novels, nor 18th century, 19th century novels. But maybe it's two kind of novels-- only the good and the bad. I think that is the only conclusion after all the discussion.

APPLAUSE

And by dull, I mean that I was not interested in them and they didn't convince me. And by being uninterested and unconvinced, I simply mean that they conveyed no impression of reality to me. And I think from the writer's point of view, it would be foolish to go any farther. The business of technical, critical dissection is another matter. But I have great faith that writers will never wholly turn into metaphysicians, and that somehow or other, the novel will survive this period of introspection, analysis, and dissection.

Those writers who are not quite as disturbed about it as this have extraordinary audiences in this country, as I'm sure Ms. Livingston will affirm either tonight or right now if she wants to. There is a fundamental human drive in all of us and it is to communicate with each other. And if every novel is an act of communication, then Mr. O'Connor is right. Unless this act of communication is existing, the novel has no existence. It is the reader who-- who makes the novel, and without that there is nothing. Art doesn't exist in the abstract. As far as we're concerned, there is no art on the planet Venus.

I felt a little, during the course of this earlier discussion, like a man in the haberdashery business who has been paid an evangelical call by a convinced nudist.

LAUGHTER

I assure you, the people of the United States do read novels, and I think that there is a great danger in claiming that the emperor hasn't any clothes on all the time. There really is such a thing as a novel, and people really do read them and they really are hungry for them. And the core of it, in my opinion, is what Mr. O'Connor has said in one way and what I'm trying to say in the other.

And I can also point out that it requires an extremely trained and sophisticated taste to get any kind of genuine entertainment out of a Kafka novel. And you could submit-- you could go right over to Boston and corral 2,000 people and give them each a copy of a Kafka book. And I would be astonished to learn that four of them actually liked it. This is a very specialized taste, but as long as you are all reading Kafka, Kafka by my standards is an existing novelist.

LAUGHTER APPLAUSE

Before we close this session, I like to note that I seemed to-- previously to note an objection in part to Mr. Simenon and Mr. Holthusen when Mr. Sloane said that if the novel is closed and put aside by the reader, that the novel does not become art.

Because a lot of novels were not read for years and years, and then they are now-- now by everybody. The point of view of the publisher is the immediate point of view. He looks at the people who will read a novel the next week or the next three months. But maybe a novel that will have five readers in the next three months will be a very large, well-known novel INAUDIBLE years later.

In the case of Flaubert that we spoke yesterday-- at the time of Flaubert he would certainly not have the publish problem because at this time nobody thinks that people will read it. Madame Bovary looked like something very boring for the people at this time, and now everybody knows it. So it's very naive, this point of view, because the man who will today throw the book is maybe the same one who in 20 years will read avidly-- avidly this book when scholars would explain to him what is in it. You know what I mean?

INAUDIBLE that Mr. Sloanee was really trying to justify the publication of a novel at that point I think. The publishing of it, not the reading or the writing of it.

Bill?

Well, this is a hard point to answer because actually, we don't know of any great works of fiction which haven't been read. I have to say, when this act occurred I simply pointed out that the reason why Flaubert remains great and alive in Mr. Simenon's mind, and to a lesser extent mine and I have no doubt Mr. O'Connor's and all of you, is simply the fact that we have read him and do read him. I never said that this had to take place the week of publication or even the month or the year of INAUDIBLE . I'm not trying to--

No, no.

If this gesture continues--

INTERPOSING VOICES

--clearly the writers can get overlooked. And that this does not diminish one whit the number or the quality of the words they've written. But in the end, I have never found a neglected masterpiece in my life. And believe me, if any of you really have hold of one, I would be very happy to give you my telephone number and office address. Because the second time around, as Mr. Simenon says quite a lot of money might be made off INAUDIBLE.

LAUGHTER

Well, it's rather late, and 8:00 the panel-- people on the panel I think have found is closer to this hour than it had seemed earlier. So I think we better adjourn today. Meet again at 8:00 tonight in Sander's Theatre.