Tag Groups used in Events

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

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.

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.

I think now we can have a roundtable discussion of these points as presented by two representatives of the publishing world. Would Mr. Lytle, since his name has been mentioned, would he like to speak? Mr. Sloane, would you pass the microphone down?

Well, I don't see how I could possibly disagree with such a beautiful woman bringing the horn of plenty in her arms. Except I would like to make one little correction, if I may. I feel like Mr. Ellison's invisible man, my name has been pronounced so many different ways. It's really a Scotch name, Lytle. And New England, as you know, are not the only people who had Puritans in that country.

Scotch-Irish were very Puritan. They kept the Sabbath and everything they laid their hands on. And I'd like to keep my name, if I might. I was overwhelmed by what I heard. I see I made a mistake in plutocratic democracy of using the word aristocracy this afternoon.

But all I was trying to say, finally, is that art, and it's not a big word. All it means is craftsmanship. That you don't take a foot at to lay the inlay to a fine tabletop, that you use the tools at hand that are best do the job and that that is the core of certainly all writing.

And that the lesser and more dilute forms, even though they sell, finely depend on the stricter form. I'm sorry to say that I have much more to say except that I feel that it's the right I must write the book and that certainly the publisher should believe in it enough to go out and try to sell it.

And I don't think finally that it's the publisher's business to determine the nature of the interest that the writer has in his craft, finally. Nor is he a literary critic, finally, as Mr. Sloane himself is he has said. Now all of these millions of copies that are sold, I don't know finally how are you going to distinguish who buys Faulkner and who buys, say a lesser, a Mickey Spillane, for example.

And I don't see finally, what kind of a judgment that has. And maybe it doesn't matter, so long as they sell them. But finally, certainly, all fiction depends on the art form. That's all I have to say.

Is there any other member of the panel who will speak to either of these speeches? Mr, O'Connor? Thank you.

I don't know that I have very much to say. And I'm very much afraid of saying what I have to say because it puts me into a state of permanent opposition. And that's a state I don't want to get into, particularly as my relations with publishers and agents have always been remarkably good.

And in fact, the only advice I ever give young writers is, find a good publisher and find a good agent and stick to them for the Lord sake. Don't go wandering around. I think I was frightfully alarmed by Miss Livingstone's speech.

I know it all sounds wonderful. Here is Faulkner by the 6 million. You're spreading the lies on a scale in which the light has never been spread before. Now, I'm a great believer, as you've gathered, in getting an audience for literature and in showing respect for one's audience.

The moment you begin to talk to me about an audience of 6 million, I want to run. Remember, I realize perfectly well that Miss Livingstone is full of almost a starry-eyed idealism about this. But there are a number of wicked people in the world who will not have her idealism.

And that sort of attitude towards literature is not entirely new because in fact, it was the gospel of somebody who was anything but a starry-eyed idealist. And that was Lord Northcliffe, who valorized the English press out of existence.

Remember the moment money comes into business on that scale, art begins to go out. I can hear Monsieur Simenon side beside me. I know he doesn't agree with me. But I've had some experience of this in the theater. And the thing which Mr. Sloane said is the real secret of it, that publishing in the 19th century was a smaller operation.

And you realize that when you've worked in a theater, real theater like the Abay, that a problem of capitalisation becomes a very serious one. I realized that I could produce any play for 100 pounds, $300. And consequently, every young writer got a chance.

And I'm quite certain, speaking as a man who has been director of a theater, that William Shakespeare's Henry V cost his company about $300, the most, $500 to produce. And the famous Hamlet that we saw cost $3 million to produce.

Now the difference between the screen Hamlet and the theater Hamlet was that Shakespeare didn't have to worry about what he said. That beautiful scene in which the French officers speak, tell dirty stories, has just disappeared. So much capital has gone in. And I've worked on films as well as working in the theater. And I realized that the more capital you put into anything, the more people come along and say, oh, you can't say this. There's too much money involved in this.

And I much prefer the smaller operation. Also when you get over-capitalization, don't forget that the squeeze is put on from other directions in the cinema. The squeeze is being put on by the workers as well. The industry has to pay out huge salaries. And the writers have to produce for the huge salaries.

They've got to produce happy endings. It's just too bad. But happy endings are necessary. And the pressure gets more and more extreme. I firmly believe that you cannot have an art if publishing is going to be over-capitalized. I want to see books produced in reasonable editions. And I want them to see them produced as cheaply as possible.

I do not want to have to cater for a public of 200,000 or 500,000, not because I don't respect them as much as I respect my own public of 3,000 or 4,000. I respect them every bit as much. But I know that if I attempt to reach them, I'm going to be destroyed as a writer.

Also another thing I'm very much afraid of about these Pocket Books, I've seen it happen in England. Miss Livingstone described the work of the reprint editor, the reprint editor, with these figures in his head, is going to choose, perhaps in a most idealistic way, perhaps in a not very idealistic way, but it's already beginning to create an awful amount of mischief in England because you get the general idea, if this book is any good, it's going to appear in a pocket edition within a year.

The fact that an author, and here, I am not speaking-- I shouldn't be speaking really at all because I'm involved in the matter. You get the feeling that any author who doesn't get into the Pocket Books can't be a really good author. And it's creating a new vulgarity, I think, in literature, a new snobbishness of sales.

We're beginning to lose the old respect for the job as a job, whether it sells or whether it doesn't sell. And all I'll say is I know perfectly well Mr. Sloane and Ms Livingstone share my views on this. And would prefer a fine book which only sold 1,000 copies to a really bad book that sold 200,000. At least they would be, at the same time, earning their living and doing what they were put into the world to do. Still I just put that forward as a point of view that I am rather afraid of it.

Mr. O'Connor.

APPLAUSE

Before asking Miss Livingston to speak about this, one thing troubles me. In the first evening, you made a very good and very proper plea for the novel to become more popular, be more widespread, not be just the possession of a small group. Yet when a novel sells, what was the figure, 6 million copies in a nation of over 150 million, is I don't want to misinterpret you.

But your present statement seems to me to suggest that this has become too popular. What is the issue here? Something between the Monday night and now, there is a difference which you can resolve. And I would like to have you do it for me only, if not for anyone else.

I think I said today, Mr. Chairman, that I entirely accepted Mr. Lytle's view of the aristocracy. I just want the aristocracy to be as wide as possible. I say the whole tone behind this implies that you're not really interested in an aristocracy.

And I pointed out that the reading public for the 19th century novel was the whole middle class. It was a huge reading public. But it left out a great many people. I don't complain about that at all. I say society was fully representative society.

I want a representative audience. I mean, there is an enormous distinction between autocracy and any form of elective democracy. I think democracy was functioning in the 19th century, although the franchise was exceedingly limited. And in some ways in England, you got a superior type of politician when the franchise was so limited, merely because he didn't have to have the same demagogic appeal.

All I'm afraid of is that somehow or other, we are going to reach the point where the value of a book disappears altogether. I am really talking about over capitalization, not that I don't want the 600,000 people to read the book. I do.

Miss Livingston, please.

Well, should I talk into that? This? First of all, I want to apologize to Mr. Lytle. I didn't mean to take your name in vain. And is it right now, Lytle?

That's right.

I'm glad we agree on the strict form of art as being superior. I certainly agree with you. And what I was trying to say was that in our experience, it is not only superior, but it is the one that endures the longest, which is an interesting influence in this mass distribution. But now I have so many notes from Mr. O'Connor that I'm not sure I'm going to get them all.

Well, I would like to disabuse you of my starry-eyed idealism. And I'm rather touched by it. It's a quality that's diminishing rapidly as old age overtakes me. And I'm glad we met tonight. Now your concluding remark, Mr. O'Connor, was something about a representative audience. I've never written a book. So I can say this with absolute impunity.

If I had spent seven years of my life or even one year of my life writing a book, which to me was a very valid experience and communication, I would not feel that an audience of 5,000 or 4,000 readers was a representative audience. And that, unfortunately, is the fate of many truly fine first novels that are published in this country today. We talk about defining terms a good deal during this conference. So I want to define a term that I think we should all accept or reject before we go much further.

I talked about paper bound reprints tonight. And a reprint, as you know, is simply a word-for-word rendition of a book that's originally been published at a higher price by a low capitalization publisher of good taste and high instincts. The only difference is it's cheaper. It's only a quarter instead of $3. And you can buy at a cigar store instead of Brentano's.

Now this particular revolution, if you like, in merchandising doesn't alarm me nearly as much as it does you because I have a good deal more faith in the judgment of more than 5,000 people. There's one thing that's always puzzled me in relationship to the discussion. Faulkner's name, I guess, has been mentioned more commonly than any other contemporary writers in the course of this novel conference.

And we all seem to be unanimously agreed that Faulkner at $3 is art. But Faulkner at a quarter is very, very dangerous. Well, I just can't accept that in a Democratic society and certainly not at Harvard University.

It seems to me that whole point of view, Mr. O'Connor, and I don't mean this at all personally, represents the kind of closed shop attitude toward art that has made it so difficult for the artist or at least the writer to survive successfully in our society. I don't think that Faulkner has been particularly corrupted by having made some money out of our editions. A matter of fact, he got the Nobel Prize after we had sold about 5 million. That may have had a corrupting influence. But he seems to be holding it pretty well.

You said something about, you're afraid that the people are going to get destroyed as writers because they sell a million copies or 6 million copies. A writer reads to be read by as many people as is written. Beethoven is no more vulgar today because millions of people listen to him on Sunday afternoons than he was 50 years ago when only a few people had gramophones. Art doesn't become corrupt because it's shared with more and more people because more and more people appreciate it.

This is a point of view that I'm a little confused about. And I very much appreciate enlightenment. Then you talked about the fact that you're afraid authors might get corrupted by money. Well, I'm afraid this is likely.

But authors have been corrupted before. They were corrupted by Hollywood. They were corrupted by the Book-of-the-Month clubs. They were corrupted by the slick magazines. I guess every time an author looks around, he's tempted. But in the long run, I think--

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

There will always be some authors who are not going to sell out. And they're not going to sell out because they're being appreciated by people with only a quarter to spend any more than they would have because they were appreciated by a handful with $3 to spend. I conclude.

Mr. O'Connor?

I don't think there's anything--

Mr. Frohock? Mr. Sloane? Mr. Frohock, please?

Yes because I speak from a slightly special vantage point, I'm one of that, how many is it, 6 million. Everyone else at this table down to Mr. Collins is either a writer or someone, a novelist, I mean, or someone intimately concerned with the production and marketing of novels. In other words, you people are all here living on me and people like me.

LAUGHTER

I buy them. And there is no doubt at all that I buy a great many more in the run of a year because I can get one for the price of a package of cigarettes. And I'm inordinately grateful for the opportunity to buy a book and not a cover. Sometimes I wish the paper would last a little longer.

But on the other hand, it's nice to have a book that you can mark up, cut apart, and so on, a very useful thing. I do have one question to ask. And I'm asking for information. Do you think that the same proportions of good and bad will stand as more and more, the paperbacks, not reprints, but the original publications, do you have any feeling that that will endanger us with an increased proportion of, there is always a necessary amount, a necessary part of the whole will be junk. Is that going to increase? Is there a danger of it?

Well, as you probably know, there are only two substantial original publishers now in paper bound editions. Others are trickling in. One is Gold Medal books and the other is Ballantine Books. And in effect, they cancel one another out pretty well because Ballantine Books have started out with an avowed, rather high-minded editorial purpose. And Gold Medal books have made no bones about the fact that they were packaging pulp in book form.

And I honestly don't know the answer to that question, Mr. Frohock. I wish we all did because it's one of the questions that are perplexing publishers and reprinters and authors the most these days. As Mr. Sloane has indicated and as I have said, there's a real problem in publishing fiction originally these days. The trade publisher takes an enormous risk. The author invests his time. And the sales are frequently frightfully disappointing.

There seems to be something rather unfair about a system that pays such dim rewards frequently for so much labor. On the other hand, the combination of trade publishing with reprints seems to have worked very, very well in most cases. But that's only 1,000 out of the 10,000 books that are published annually.

I haven't the vaguest idea of what the future will be. I do know that as of the moment, originals in paper bound editions have tended to be much more of the pre-fabricated book. And I'm sure this is idealism. And I know that it's very unpopular, particularly at literary conclaves.

But it's true that the poor books drive themselves out of the market because the poor books are read by people for whom the reading experience is a different thing from the person who relishes and is rewarded by a good book. And I would think that the best control we have in original publishing at paper is the same we have in reprint publishing at paper, the public who responds to the books.

One of the most fascinating books on our list, and this isn't a precise answer to a question, is Susanne Langer's book, Philosophy in a New Key, which had been published-- well, I think it had been imported in this country. It was published in Oxford, 1,500 sheets we imported. No, excuse me, there was a Harvard University press book. And heavens, in a first printing of 1,500 copies. And we did it as A Mentor Book in a very small first printing, 50,000.

We have sold about 220,000 copies of this very difficult book on philosophy. And no one would have thought that that book would have had that vogue or that success in a paper edition. But it had. And I think for every Gold Medal book, you find an equally encouraging example on the other side of the fence. But I think the future is a great mystery to me. How about you, Bill?

It's a very great mystery to me. And I do have the feeling that, so far as the low-priced paperback reprints are concerned, the following characteristics of them as they appear to me to be, without either approval or disapproval, ought to be laid on the carpet.

In the first place, these books are the beneficiaries of the successful merchandising of another field, that is the magazine publishing field. And they're the beneficiaries of this in two ways. At the retail level, at the point-of-sale level, there are a very large number of places which have learned that they can make money off selling magazines. And the books are, from their point of view, identical, as far as record keeping and the like goes.

And second and much more important, the distribution system, which has made possible the large magazine industry of the United States is also being used by, I think, every one or all but one of the paper covered reprint houses. And that had these distribution systems not been in effect, it would probably have been quite impossible for my industry to finance any such development.

And I remember, and I am not at all sure whether the people directly concerned with it would remember this or not, but many years ago, when I was in the business of selling plays for amateurs by mail and working for a Boston company, I was asked to go and see Mr. DeGraff. At that time, I was an expert in direct mail. And I found Mr. DeGraff in a rather small office.

And he said to me, Bill, I am going to start a company which is going to sell books to the American public at $0.25 or less. And it's going to do it by mail, just like Holden and Juniors, only a little more so. And I understand you know what time of year to send out mailings and other things.

And this came about because Mr. DeGraff, classmate of a brother-in-law, and older brother-in-law of mine. So after about a morning of earnest conversation, I managed to persuade him that this would not work. But even the idea of Pocket Books, which is the originator of the $0.25 reprint idea was originally conceived, without reference to what subsequently turned out to be its greatest economic asset, or at least I think so, Hilda, which is the distribution system through which it operates.

And this carries with it from your point of view as writers and also as book readers a certain word of caution or warning. There's a limit to the display space, to the rack space, to the amount of choice which can possibly be offered to you as readers, as long as this distribution and merchandising mechanism is the one that is employed for the distribution of these low-priced books.

And 1,000 titles a year is, I think, really almost more than the traffic will bear. And those of you who have read some of the very interesting pieces written by Freeman Lewis and others on whether or not the mechanism will stand another book a month, well, know that this is a very serious problem.

There will never be a substitute for a really intelligent person for a bookseller who understands in what you are interested and who will go to the trouble of notifying you of this in the first place. Only one in 10 of the books that might interest you will ever appear in paper covers at all. Second place you may very easily miss them because they come and go on a 30-day average.

And it's not at all uncommon to miss something that you'd want very much. In a third place, most of us are, I think, a lot of different people in one. And this is where I am the most disturbed about this as an editor. I said earlier that I tried to identify myself with the prospective reader. Any editor does. It's at the editor's desk that the reader and the writer meet. I think I put it that way.

Now, I'm a lot of different people all in the same package. And I think you all must be the same. I have two or three extremely special interests. For instance, I am very much interested in certain problems connected with Mayan archaeology. And I think it'll be a long time before Pocket Books comes out with an inexpensive 35 cent copy of the best information which I would like to have on certain problems of Mayan archaeology.

The other hand, I would probably pay Mr. Wilson $10 for the Harvard University Press's volume on this subject, which if it hasn't come out yet, will undoubtedly someday come out and everything in between. I also enjoy the corniest kind of general fiction. I get a wonderful time out of things like Ravel and Arms and all. I mean, and at this point, I am one with 60 million Americans.

And yet, at the point of my interest in Mayan archaeology, I'm probably at one with no more than 1,000. And any intelligent person runs this whole gamut. The paper bound books do very well.

For that part of you which belongs to, what is it, the highest common multiple of the society in which you live. It will never nourish you it the reading level in the special areas where you're the most different from other people because it can't. And therefore, both are necessary.

Thank you, Bill. Mr. Simenon, you have had some experience with publishers. Would you speak to this?

I think have nothing very interesting to say. Maybe about the publishing business, may just I have a remark. I don't think that the danger about publishing will come from the $0.25 edition on the contrary.

But maybe Mr. O'Connor was right in telling that the question of money necessary to publish a book now is a danger. And the danger come that the publisher, for first thought, is reason to I give the artist my money.

And for another reason was I think the length of a room and bookshops and everywhere, try to have books where sell in a very, very short time. A book now has to be selling three months or six months or eight months, try to have a book published one year before you can find it only in $0.25 edition. A $0.25 edition keep the books.

So the publisher first try to find what they call a bestseller. It's not necessarily a good book. It's a book with an interest to people at such time for such or such reason. So he don't try anymore to find author who will live for 30 years or 40 years in the public mind but an author who will give a fast money and as soon as possible.

For example, Conrad is considering the publishing business as a very bad author because Conrad still sell but still a few books every year. So it interest nobody to have covered in their house, you know what I mean? And then the publishers turned to get their money back through another way. They don't speak anymore about books about novels like novels.

But as Mr. Sloane say, it's as a piece of property. And as soon as they have the book and the contract is signed, they trying to sell no books, 3,000, 4,000. They're interested in books. But they're more interested in rights. They're selling rights, the radio rights, television rights, movies rights, and everything.

A first serial, second serial, if there's the average selling of a book said Mr. Sloane it's about 6,000. That cost no too much money because they didn't involve too much publicity, too much work. But to go from 6,000 to 20,000, it involves a big risk because you have at this time to do a publicity and to take a risk.

It's more interesting to sell just 3,000, even 1,000, even one book. But to sell in Hollywood the rights for $50,000 and to keep the half and sometimes more, and it's more interesting to sell it in the television of the same condition too. You know? And it's why the contract now, the printed contract and most of the publishing house speak very, very little about books but a lot about rights and about television, about everything with no books. That's the question. Why, I don't know.

Thank you very much. Mr. Ellison, have you any thoughts on this subject?

Very little, actually. I not like Mr. Simenon. I only have one novel. But about the business of money corrupting the novelist, it just occurred to me that most of the-- well, not even most of the younger writers but many of the younger writers and indeed, many men who have mastered their craft cannot live on the returns from their work.

And I'm just wondering whether it's any more corrupting to receive an income, a livable income, from the mass distribution of one's works than to know that every year or so, you're going to have to fill out an application to the Guggenheim Foundation or to the Rosenwald Foundation, which no longer exist, and for which I am very sorry because I had one of their grants once, or to have to go in and take an advance from a publisher when you don't know whether you're going to be able to finish a book.

I don't know. I write for one reason, because I think I could make more money doing other things. And that is to get readers. And the more, the merrier. I don't think it necessarily corrupts the writer. I just think this.

And here I'm selling the same old bill of goods that I was selling last night is that there must be some way of putting together novels which will speak on one level to the person who is just interested, whose interest is limited, whose interest is limited simply to what happens next and yet have all the other end at the same time.

I remember that some very great novels appeared as newspaper serials. Dostoevsky certainly did and Dickens and many others. I don't think that destroys the writer. And I think the audience just-- well, you have to communicate with that audience. And your art form has to be molded by that.

Thank you. Are there questions from the audience? Question right here in the third row.

I'd like to ask Mr. Simenon and Mr. Sloane perhaps to discuss the influence of literary prizes given by juries of literate men on the sale of books. The reason I asked Mr. Simenon and Mr. Sloane to consider the question is because in France, the literary prizes seem to have very much the same effect on the sale of a book as the Book of the Month selection here.

And I was just curious to know whether they see a trend in this country with Mr. Ellison's winning of the National Book Award and William Styron's winning the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, prizes like those on which you have men like Alan Tate on the juries. Do these have any effect on sales? And if so, do they see any trend toward a reinforcing of this particular phenomenon in the future?

Mr. Sloane, would you, as a publisher, speak to this?

This is a very intelligent question to ask and a very difficult one to answer. Either the first or second year of the National Book Award, a book which I published won the non-fiction award. As a matter of fact, it was a book written by a member of the Harvard faculty. The American Book trade purchased some 1,500 additional copies of this book, which we supplied with a band stating that the book had won the Award and the like.

And we took 900 of the 1500s back when the whole thing was over and the publicity had died down so that some 600 additional copies of this book were purchased and distributed in this country at a very substantial loss to the book's publisher, who had to pay the freight both ways and also was expected to buy a series of advertisements proclaiming the honor which had come his way.

And let me assure you that anyone who buys advertising space in the newspaper today needs to have a good bank account. On the other hand, I'm inclined to believe that the publishers welcome in this country some competition for the Pulitzer Prize awards, which up to the time of the National Book awards, were almost the only awards which had any significance at all.

And a Pulitzer Prize or awards would long ago have fallen into disrepute if it were not for the fact that a good many of them are given for various newspaper activities such as cartooning, the best news photo, and other really ridiculous subjects. I mean, imagine giving a Pulitzer Prize for a photograph and allying that with the best novel, the best play, the best work of the creative imagination.

This is at the worst, a flick of the wrist in a minute. Maybe the man risked his life to get it. But the things are incommensurable. And there's a lot of bad feeling about this. And the Pulitzer juries got rigged and all kinds of things. Remember, a year in which a person who shall be nameless won the award for poetry in this country for a book which not one of you would recognize in the same year that Robert Frost produced a new volume of verse. And he didn't get the Pulitzer Prize because he'd already had it, you see.

So all this had brought a lot of bad feeling about the Pulitzer awards into being. And a competition for it seemed, to the book manufacturer's institute and the book publishers and the book critics, to be a good idea. Now, we all contribute quite heavily to the expenses of this. And it's an investment in publicity, if you want to put it that way.

On our part, we believe in it. And we hope that it will have a good effect, both upon readership for books overlooked by the Pulitzer committees, and on the Pulitzer committees themselves. But I don't think the influence in this country is anything like the one is in France. Mr. Simenon can speak about that. But--

Mr. Simenon.

Please, just INAUDIBLE first, I will say that I am against prize for any kind of art because I don't think that the artist has to be encouraged. If he is an artist, if he has to do something, he will do it against everything and against everybody. If he is not, you may give all the prize in the world. It will never be won. And it will tie. It will be an amateur. It will be a hard thing.

So I am absolutely against it. Now about the influence, you have this, I think, that the literary prize in France are more like here some books of the month. They are not read by the public. They are about to be in the good place and living room so people know that you are a literary people.

Mr. Frohock, will you speak on this subject?

May I just add to that the reminder that among all the winners of the Prix Goncourt, there are probably two titles that can be retained. One of those was the Man's Hope of Malraux. And the other was, and I have not retained the title, either the second or the third part of NON-ENGLISH Those are the only two.

Is there one more question from the audience over in this side? If not, I should like to thank the members of the conference and the audience and adjourn.

APPLAUSE

First of all, I wonder if the people in the back would fill up seats to the front. This makes a better operation all the way around. In the very first row, I wonder if the members of the conference or other members of parliament?

A word about the microphone system, which is always a problem for everyone, has been solved very well here, I believe. That is, you're not supposed to walk to the microphone when you are making a statement from the audience. I'm told that if you merely look directly at the microphone from anywhere you are, the way they are scattered around is such that it will pick up the sound for this particular room. So instead of spending the afternoon stumbling over each other's feet, just speak from where you are at at that point.

The function of these afternoon sessions is to add new material to the subject of the conference and give further opportunity to work over things that have been stated previously. We're fortunate to have today as a speaker, who will talk for approximately half an hour or so, a man who will give us new material and, I think, be dealing also with the essential subjects that were raised last night and will, I assume, be raised throughout the rest of the meeting.

Professor Frohock has been a professor of French at Columbia University for some time. He is an authority on modern fiction. He's published a book about a certain group of American novels. The book's entitled, I believe-- I know the book well. I own the book. It's Novel of Violence in America. Is this correct?

And he has also written a volume about Malraux, and is to speak to us today about some of the problems of literary criticism and the novel. Are our critical systems and devices suitable for fiction in its contemporary form? Professor Frohock.

APPLAUSE

The briefest possible correction, as of July 1st, I changed my allegiance from Columbia University to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and hereby declare Columbia absolved from any responsibility, possibly eligible for your congratulations.

Let me remind you first of what went on last evening. I'm supposed to be, I understand, an authority on violence. Actually, that was a clip book and I didn't even select the title. Ever since I wrote the thing as it happened, people, mothers pull their babies out of the way and grown men look worried lest I produce a scalp or fire off a gun.

I was among those who enjoyed the peaceable quality of yesterday evening. We had a very mannerly meeting. There was no quibbling about terms and no descent into semantics. We didn't fight, although the assistant director of the summer session had solemnly predicted that we would object word-by-word to the title of the conference. We didn't quibble over the word "novel." We accepted tacitly the widest possible definition.

We didn't fight over the word "contemporary." Although as it happened, Mr. O'Connor's contemporary period seemed to end with Proust and the Joyce of the middle period, whereas Mr. Hyman's began just about where Mr. O'Connor's left off. We allowed Mr. O'Connor to have his way with the word "reality" and we didn't invite him to define it.

We let him consign to limbo all fiction that is underlain by an idealist view of the world, not without somewhat irascible protest from one end of the table.

We heard Mr. West characterize Mr. Ellison's Invisible Man in one of its aspects as Dickensian, whereas Mr. Hyman had previously identified it as a novel, which followed the modern trend of exploiting ritual and myth.

One of our members referred to Benjamin Constant. And after a bit of verification, I remind him that that was not one lady he saw Benjamin Constant with last night. That was Madame Trevor, Madame Lindsay, a lady whose name I forget, although it began with B and she lived up in the Alps, and of course, Madame de Stael.

Some of the things that I have just said I say in order to clarify a few references in this very brief discussion of criticism and the future of the novel. The future of the novel never looked darker than it does today. That is, if we believe what is written about it.

So here we go again. Every so often, someone, and someone, in this case, means critic, writes the obituary, "the novel is dying", "the novel is dead". Someone, and this time meaning someone not a critic, ought to write, "the death of the novel". But let him be ready to add a new chapter every decade or so for the corpse as a nastily inconvenient way of reviving and getting back on its feet again like an eternal Lazarus.

The future of the novel, as a matter of fact, never looked darker than it did in France just about 100 to 120 years ago. A stupendous amount of fiction was being published. The new literacy, which had followed the establishment of Democratic institutions, had produced a public avid for books, one with affluence to buy and with leisure to read. The Industrial Revolution had brought cheaper paper and abundant printers ink. The press had developed into a production machine.

And Michel-Levy had had the perfectly luminous idea that no law of nature required the publisher to sell an expensive binding with every book. Meanwhile, Émile de Girardin had invented the modern newspaper, more or less, and discovered that any continued story on the back page, so long as it regularly suspended at a high point in the action, was an immense help for sales.

Fiction prospered. But its quality, by and large, in these years from 1828 to, say, 1858, was perfectly terrible. It was awful, if you look at it as a whole, for the public that was buying newspapers and books had not been brought up in the good classical tradition and it lacked taste. It asked only to be amused and would accept, to the profit of author and publisher, pretty much whatever amused it.

Such demands create a vacuum that nature does not even have time to abhor. We do not even remember the names of most of those who helped fill it with what was mostly simply horrid, hackneyed, monotonous trash. At best, we can name superior ones, Dumas, Père, Eugene Sue.

But on the roster, indistinguishable to most eyes from the rest, were Balzac and Stendhal, Gozlan and Champfleury, Duranty and Murger. And to most eyes, I say they were indistinguishable from the rest.

One of the finest generations of critics France has ever known, men like Jules Janin, Gustave Planche, and the great Sainte-Beuve, complained, roared, and snubbed. But the thunders from Parnassus had absolutely no visible effect. The spate of fiction rolled on, regardless, while the critics raised the cry long since familiar to us all. Where is the good old novel of tradition?

They seem to have meant the romance in the manner of Scott, who had been popular in their youth, and the realistic episodic yarn, like that of the still widely read Lesage. And so critic after critic concluded that the day of good fiction had passed. Yet, of course, those years from 1828 to 1857 saw the French novel develop, the true French novel develop.

Lengthened the period by one decade, so that it will include the beginnings of French naturalism. And it would be hard to find another period which produced so much serious and excellent literature. Balzac and Stendhal fall into its early part, so did the minor realists, so a little later does Flaubert, so do Feydeau and Feuillet, those once popular predecessors of Bourget and Henry James.

So toward its close, through the beginnings of Zola and de Goncourt, where was the novel? Well, it was where the great critics weren't looking for it. Sainte-Beuve could not abide the cheap coarseness of Balzac. To Stendhal, he preferred the novels of Scott, Manzoni, and Xavier de Maistre, who wrote the monumentally insipid Voyage Autour De Ma Chambre.

LAUGHTER

He did better in understanding Flaubert for he was older in 1857 and knew more, and was not insensitive to the spirit of the times. But still, as his detractors still joyfully remind us, he hardly paid Madame Bovary its due and he had much company.

The story of how gradually French criticism became aware that men like Balzac, Stendhal, and then Champfleury and Flaubert had changed the nature of the novel, has not even yet been told in its entirety. But this much is clear, for a space, the critics were at least a quarter century behind the times. And in the case of Stendhal, they were even further off the pace.

Why? We had better be attentive to the answer, for these critics may have been any number of things, they were not malicious dolts. Not all of them can have been infected by the animosity regularly attributed to Sainte-Beuve. They were educated, careful readers, and men of taste. And some of them, at least, must really have wanted to know where the novel was.

Doubtless, they failed, in part, because they were prejudiced. They had been reared on an aristocratic literature, and the new novel was not aristocratic. And then, it is also true that winnowing the good out of the mediocre was a discouraging task. There was as there always is, from the critic's point of view, too much fiction. But it is true also, however hard to believe this may seem now, that they were unable to discriminate the good from the indifferent when they had the chance.

Balzac, for instance, was merely another noisy fortune seeker, a rather offensive one, who alienated so many critics that, eventually, almost the only voice raised in his behalf was his own. However much trouble we have in realizing it, Baudelaire and Taine were doing something that marked the beginning of a new day when they spoke out in real enthusiasm for his work.

For the run of critics, his fictions were too unlike the fictions they knew and admired. His novels bald and squalled. And the similarities of his works with those of Sue-- Look, for instance, at the character, Vautrin, straight out of Sue, until you look at him. --at some length, were all too obvious.

The lesson of the past, then, although it is the only guide we have, is that the past is not to be trusted. Everyone concedes that the novel has no rules and is free to develop in the most unpredictable directions. In any direction, that is, except one. It will not go backward any more than it will stand still.

The French critics were hamstrung by inability to recognize originality, because they were looking resolutely over their shoulders at what had been written. And so, if you believe me-- And if you don't, why there's our discussion for the afternoon.

LAUGHTER

So do ours, so are ours looking back over their shoulders today. The doubt that Americans read can be dispelled at any drugstore. Somewhere between the fountain and the cigar counter is mute evidence that even a good novel can be sold, if only we put it in soft colors, illustrated with irrefutable proof that woman is, above all else, a mammal.

LAUGHTER

And most of the fiction is junk, as always. But hidden amid the junk are, or soon must be, the fictions that assure the novel of the future. Our critics are confronted by a sterner task, as the one that faced the French a century ago. They seem, to me, unlikely to do the job any better. The safety of a pre-established rhetoric, based on what the novel has been, is simply too attractive, even to the most influential who least need protection and safety.

Ortega y Gasset's Notes on the Novel, for example, furnish a fairly convincing argument that the novel, as he understands that word, is nearly extinct. He means those fictions, which have just enough action to satisfy the psychological needs of the reader, who must have something to focus his mind on, but that abound in the rich texture of life that make us provincials in the country of the author and that delve deeply into human motive.

His contention that this novel becomes progressively harder to write is not hard to accept. Subject dunny situations do seem to become fewer as time goes on and, certainly, the supply is not inexhaustible. We are unlikely to get many more novels like those of Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Proust, Ortega's favorites on which his notion of the novel is based.

But since the writing of his note, we have had successful novels from France, Italy, and the United States, which are full of action, handled the question of motive by recourse to psychologies of obsession, can be said hardly to provincialize us, and convey a blessed little feeling of life's rich texture. In reality, what Ortega says is that the novel is unlikely to repeat itself. And that question hasn't been at issue.

And yet the American formalist critics-- And may I call attention to my use of the word "formalist" because I do not want to confuse them, necessarily, with the people we know as the new critics, although, at times, they may be the same people. The new criticism with its immense contribution in the way of linguistic criticism, I'd like to leave to one side, and simply look at the formalist attempts to understand and judge fiction.

These American formalist critics, who have recently turned from poetry to the novel, apparently expect the novel to repeat itself. We have learned much from this group, who have attacked the question of fictional form, armed with the rhetoric originally derived, in large part at least, from the critical prefaces of Henry James.

It is now obligatory to ask their questions of any novel and of any novelist. How does he handle point of view? And we no longer have to say what we mean by point of view. How and in what proportions does he use dramatized scene, portrait, and summary? What rhythms of repeated symbol, emblem or emblematic action? What recurrent juxtapositions of materials characterize the structure?

What means does he have of investigating motive and of registering the hidden psychological life of his characters? Does he show us the background of the action or does he make us feel it as climate? Is there a causal relation between what the background is and what the characters do?

How does he contrive to station the reader at an appropriate distance from the action? And how does he manage to convey to us the feeling that what happens to his specific individuals is of general human importance? There is, obviously, nothing wrong with asking such questions. But all the same danger in here is in them.

Earlier this year, Caroline Gordon reviewed the late EK Brown study of Willa Cather for The New York Times. Ms. Gordon is an established critic whose pronouncements carry weight. She is a formalist. Her House of Fiction, done in collaboration with Allen Tate, is respected.

But she reports her dissatisfaction with Willa Cather's books because of a dissatisfaction caused by Ms. Cather's refusal, or lack of disposition, to put a central moral consciousness into her novels. In other words, she would like Ms. Cather's novels better, if they were more like the novels of Henry James.

This judgment has the importance of a symptom. It appears likely that a criticism of fiction, based upon the precept and example of Henry James, is likeliest to predispose the critic toward those novels which are most Jamesian.

One can only surmise how different the scale of literary reputations would be in America today, if the formalists had not acquired their present prestige. Would Woolf, Farrow, and Dreiser be quite so far from the top, if their work lent itself a bit more easily to formal analysis?

We have done our best, of late years, to make a great writer out of Scott Fitzgerald, an easy subject for formalist criticism, while we have let the repute of Sinclair Lewis, about whom a formalist can say all he has to say in any 5 minutes, descend almost to absolute zero. The list could be continued, but let that pass.

The question here is merely whether a form of criticism, which is not entirely adequate to the literature of the present, will be of much help in detecting superior quality in the novels of the future? The novel of the future, we don't know what it will be. But we do know that it will not repeat itself and we do know that it will not be Jamesian. We have a good Jamesian novelist in our literary history already.

Meanwhile, our other dominant critical group, whom I'm calling the liberal ideologues, and I hope I'm not going to be asked to define ideology. There was a conference on ideology as it turned out here some two weeks ago.

Liberal ideologues are also intently scanning the past. Critics like Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv, less interested in literary form than in ideas and cultural attitudes, who, in fact, study the novel as the expression of culture, seeming not in as awkward a position vis-a-vis the future as do the formalist.

Trilling, even though his studies of fiction will add to anyone's enjoyment of reading, is so deeply convinced of the importance of the relationship between fiction and society that he is also convinced that only when manners and morals are supported by a firm social organization does the novelist succeed.

Unless I'm completely misreading the liberal imagination, he is really saying that the novels of which he is especially fond have been the work of authors who lived, or mistakenly thought that they lived, in such a society. Please, note the tense or tenses. No. Please, note the tense of the verbs just above.

In the past, such novels have indeed come from such conditions. But will the novel of the future require them? Is Trilling's kind of novel the only kind that can achieve excellence? Trilling is, by common consent, a learned and sensitive critic. But he is looking even so in the direction from which the new does not come.

He represents a group of critics who have made much, recently, of ethics. They affirm frequently that the novel is, and I quote, but I quote no one critic, I quote what all of them have said in one way or another, "an organization of experience by the moral imagination." This is far from being the self-evident truth.

Organization of experience, of course, it is, the novel is, and has to be. But why need the motive of the imagination be moral? There are other motives. Suppose, for instance, that some imaginations are urged on by a drive to reorder experience into something more fair and fit. That drive does not have to be moral any more than our feeling is exclusively moral when we find a pigsty or a slum repulsive.

Such critics are on firmer ground when they argue that the American novel, in recent years, has failed to take a firm enough grasp on experience, especially political experience, and thus has failed to do the job of reordering where it most needs to be done.

Philip Rahv's talk about Redskins and pale faces in Image and Idea comes down to some such charge. The novel, such critics say, has failed to cope with the central intellectual problems of our time. They may very well be right, at least as compared with the novels of Malraux, Kessler, and Silone, to mention the three who were always mentioned in this connection.

Some of our novelists look intellectually still to be in rompers. Be that as it may, the critics are overlooking the nature of the accomplishment of several important recent American novelists. Many of the latter-- I said "several" a minute ago. Let me stick to "several". Quite a number have spent their literary lives orchestrating one central emotion. Hemingway, Dos Passos, and especially Steinbeck, who rarely writes well, save when he is angry, are prime examples.

In another age, such men might well have become lyric poets. Their chief concern is their own relation to the universe, a personal matter. Mr. Rahv is asking them to be concerned with something else. Our public knows this. Sometimes, is embarrassingly aware of it.

You may remember that, not a year ago, when The Old Man and the Sea came out, an interpretation went flying on the wind around America. Everybody knew what this really meant. The sharks were Hemingway's critics, and so forth and on. I hope that that wasn't true. I hope that that was not Hemingway's intention. But I think it is significant of our reading and comprehension of Hemingway, that a yawn like that could get started. There's a sort of moral truth there that's fairly worrisome.

Well, as I say, Mr. Rahv is asking our novelists to be something desirable, no doubt, but something that they aren't. After all, everyone can't be Malraux. And as a matter of fact, having watched his conduct closely for some time, I'm fairly convinced that Malraux can't be Malraux all the time either.

If we persistently apply wrong categories to the literature of the present, where will we get with the emergent literature of the future? Mr. Rahv's interests are legitimate and honorable. He continues, really, that search, which has been going on for two generations now, for a usable past. Like the formalists' kind of criticism and like Lionel Trilling's, his criticism is performing one sort of function and a useful function.

But the fact is that we need a criticism which will perform a different one. Its motto will be Baudelaire, to transform delight into knowledge, "transformer ma volupté en connaissance." It will be banned, like Baudelaire's, on finding, in the work of art, what is new and unique.

It will not abandon what we have all learned from the formalists. But it will admit, more than the formalists have admitted in their practice, that considerations of form lead straight to the consideration of ideas, that, for example, characterization and psychological notation change meaning with each new discovery about the mental life of the human animal.

Such a criticism, when it picks up a book like the Invisible Man-- And if Mr. Ellison, who has heard an inordinate amount about The Invisible Man last night and today, can't stand it any longer and gets up and stomps out, I would understand the act and sympathize.

Even so, when such a criticism picks up a book like the Invisible Man, it will note that Mr. Ellison's novel has, at one moment in it, a situation that sounds like Malraux, certainly, the active worker has been sold out by the people above him in the party. It will say something, perhaps quite a bit, about other underground heroes in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, Celine, and Bernanos. It may even note that, in places, the book has a Dickensian resonance.

But an adequate criticism of this novel will also have to become more interested still in the aspects of the Invisible Man, which are unique. One such, and this is simply tossed out as an example-- And it is entirely possible that Mr. Ellison will be first to say I'm wrong, in which case I shall concede the point, but merely argue that my example was badly chosen.

One such element is the particular tone of the part of the book which takes place in New York. The hero, a little man caught in the situation that would try a hero of completely tragic stature, is forced to assimilate experience faster than experience can be assimilated with equanimity.

The mind revolts. Reality buzzes and booms at him. The exterior world explodes at him, beats him up, shuts him up in a box. Experience shoots at him and throws spears. The hero's mind posits an objective, verifiable reality outside itself and assumes it to be where it should be.

But the continuous shock makes him perceive it as if it were hallucination. The impact of so violent a world keeps him on the ragged line that separates fantasy from waking, from waking and stably conscious life. This is the effect that Celine aims at in Journey to the End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan without ever quite bringing it off.

How Ralph Ellison brings it off demands the attention of the kind of critic we so badly need. Criticism of the kind I've been asking for may be slow in coming, but we must have it, and it's not inconceivable that we shall.

APPLAUSE

I think today we should feel that we have the luxury of having time for discussion. Usually, after speeches, there's a great desire for the audience and participants in general to talk. Yet, there isn't enough time. Today, I think we should feel secure and in having at least until about 4:15. Therefore, I think everyone should feel he can say what he wants to say.

I should like to ask if there's any comment from any of the members of the conference. Mr. Hyman? Excuse me. If every speaker would just rise where he is, I believe that these microphones are not speaking to the audience, merely putting the proceedings on tape, and you will be picked up from wherever you are if you look at the microphone. Thank you.

Well, since I spoke last night of the moral imagination in a favorable tone, I imagine that I'm tarred with Mr. Frohock's brush. And I just want to put in one reservation that I think he's using the term in too limited a fashion to reduce the moral imagination to some kind of ethical concern, as perhaps Mr. Trilling, who is not entirely my favorite critic, does seems to me to be making too little of what I think, as I claimed last night, is a central phenomenon in all fictional or all imaginative writing.

I would insist, that is, that the moral imagination is not an ethical matter only but is the organization of experience into significance, that is, can be equated with form, can be equated with the craft of art. Insofar as this experience is made meaningful is organized, that is an exercise of the moral imagination.

These facts are related, are structured meaningfully in relation to human life. And I would add, too, along those lines, to Mr. Frohock's slogan from Baudelaire, one that I think I think is significant there. Freud's slogan, that we must colonize ed with ego. That spreading of the rational, the idea that Freud said was the principle of his work and that is probably the principle of ours, too.

The idea that somehow we have to drain these irrational marshes is the operation of the artist and, of course, is the operation of the moral imagination in infection and should probably be the critics' concern, too.

Mr. Frohock, please.

Under moral, would you include aesthetic?

Oh, I would, surely.

Well, then I'm right with you all the way. I don't think that Mr. Trilling does. In fact, I can put my hand on the Bible and say that he doesn't because we have discussed it. I think, then, probably that we're tied up in the ambiguity of a word that we may have to throw overboard.

Mr. Lytle?

I would say, why not just use imagination makes images? That said, in this instance, I would think that the beginning of criticism is that which the writer himself uses when he steps back and looks at his work.

And I would say that any kind of dramatic treatment of fiction-- that is, where the fiction is dramatic rather than the memoir type of novel-- that if you have some such image at the post as a kind of a controlling factor-- as I think War and Peace, for example, has and many others-- that you get out of this ambiguity.

By moral, of course, it is an aesthetic point. But it seems to me the mere fact of an image-- that is, an imagination makes pictures and images, and that is controlled through some dramatic action. And I believe-- I mean, I'm objecting also in terms of that to the word organization. I don't believe that's the way it grows.

I think it is a kind of growth that's controlled, that you use a craft, which is a concrete thing upon the invisible content of the mind. So some way in there, you get the creative act that nobody quite knows how it's done. It is finely mysterious. And it seems to me that in a matter of organization, the moment you organize a thing, you kill it, moment.

And so that is not actually the process. I know I've been speaking about two different things here. Since it is a general discussion, I propose then that you use just for imagination since it seems to me that is a thing that the artist himself uses directly. And by controlling it by craft, he reaches or may reach what he sets out to reach. But by organization, you will kill the creative act.

Well, Mr. Lytle, part of our difference there may be regional. I'm probably too much of a swamp Yankee to want to appear as the enemy of the word moral. But on the other hand, for the purposes that we're working at, which is to find a label, I would have no-- I think probably a good old word that has been batted around as much as imagination has is as useful as any.

If Mr. Hyman has a special reason for retaining the word moral, I'd rather he were the one to defend it. As for organization, the letter killeth I think by the word organization, we mean, really, simply ordering some activity of the mind, and we're pretty vague about the psychology of it.

The French use the object very frequently to the word organization as a barbarism and instead say, put order in. SPEAKING IN FRENCH such and such a thing, which really suggests-- unless it suggests the straitjacket-- suggests some sort of process. And I think that's all we're at. Am I wrong?

Well, I won't fight for organization, but I'm afraid I have to fight for moral. Organization is perhaps a bad word in that it does suggest this kind of mechanical operation. I'd be glad to move on to any other more satisfactory one. But just seeing this thing in terms of the imagination seems to me, again, to lack enough distinction.

I suspect that a boy pulling the wings off flies is exercising the imagination so that some other operation is involved in art. And I think probably I liked organization because of that idea of the ordering. There's a poem of Wallace Stevens called "A Jar in Tennessee," I think, about placing a jar on a bare hilltop in Tennessee, and all the wilderness around it comes into shape because of that jar.

That it seems to me is a little fable of the artist's role. That is, this organization of that wilderness by that jar is, I would insist, a moral act, is an act of the moral imagination, is the creation of art.

With that poem is an illustration, though. The poem goes on to point out that the wilderness also makes the jar somewhat-- this overly organized jar-- somewhat tawdry, so that I believe that the poem by Wallace Stevens doesn't answer this question. It's just in the middle of both sides of the discussion.

INAUDIBLE

Just a moment here, and then I won't get up any more. I believe I said that you put the image, which might be a symbol, even, at the post of observation. I must say that here I defend not the formless, but those people who use form. Formalism and the formalist-- again, I don't want to be quibbling-- but not quite the word.

But if you do suppose you do take a position. Well, don't you get a dichotomy there? That is, if you look only into your own imagination, into yourself, your ego, you get a narcissistic kind of thing. And if you look only over here into the world, you get lost into the discrete objects of the world.

But if you get kind of an insight into yourself and insight into the world and focus that all through this image here, this controlling image at the point of view, then the matter of the moral issue will be behind in your mind. That's what I'm at. I didn't mean to defend immorality here.

LAUGHTER

But that's the kind of thing I mean. It seems to me that is a sort of function that the artist may undertake. In other words, I'm saying the thing of organization-- to come to the other part-- is that it superimposes on the raw matter of the subject before you really know what it is, before you've dealt with it enough, a kind of arbitrary ordering, which might inhibit the creative act.

Mr. O'Connor?

I don't think I've got very much to say, Mr. Chairman. I just feel that this is no place for a simple-minded Irishman.

LAUGHTER

I gathered from Professor Frohock that he was against the criticism of form, and I also gathered that he was against criticism based on the social consciousness. And I also gather that he was against criticism based on ethical consciousness.

We were apparently starting a new school of criticism to be called the transformists. And the only principle of the transformist school of criticism is if I translate Baudelaire correctly to transform voluptuousness into information.

Now, I find that awfully difficult to follow--

LAUGHTER

--and I wish somebody would clarify it for me. As a mere artist, I feel that I'm being imposed upon, that I'm being asked to do a great number of things which I haven't the faintest intention of doing for anybody.

LAUGHTER

Can I ask--

Mr. Frohock?

Yes, please.

LAUGHTER

How would you like to be in my place?

LAUGHTER

First of all, I'm not the Irishman, and therefore, shouldn't be expected to be against everything. And I--

LAUGHTER

And I'm a little bit alarmed to discover that I've been understood to reject at least two forms of critical activity, which I thought I was recommending but calling incomplete.

And I'd like to correct myself, if I did seem to reject them, and insist that I was saying that each one by itself did an incomplete job and that because of their incompleteness they were more or less at liberty to walk around like those people in the inferno who are punished by having their heads twisted around in the other direction.

That, I hoped, was my point. As for transformism, dear, I associate that with biology, somehow, and I'm a little bit lost. But the main point is that Baudelaire wasn't asking the artist to do it. Baudelaire was asking the critic to do it.

The onus isn't on you, sir, except that, as you do so well once in a while, put on the wolf's clothing. You are under some obligation now and then.

LAUGHTER

Baudelaire was talking about Tannhauser of all things. And the music delighted him, and he discovered that other people underwent or experienced, rather, a very similar delight. And nobody had tried to say why, and that carried him from what I would call an intuitive experience-- almost a shock on the nerves, if you like-- into some sort of mental activity.

And he tries to figure out why it is that Tannhauser delights him, which seems to me one of the necessary operations of all criticism. In any case, although I recommend that attitude, I didn't invent it.

Mr. Ellison, would you speak to this subject? I'm not at this moment sure what the subject is, but would you speak to it nevertheless?

I'm afraid I'm in very much the same position. I would say this, that I rather agree with Mr. Hyman that despite our intentions, the novelist does perform a moral role. And the imagination is moral simply because it creates value.

Now, you can find in this ethics. You can find in it many other things. But it's implicit, and any form which is so obsessed with time, change, and the mysteries of society-- of course, of human experience.

I see no way of avoiding the fact that in the very business of selection and ordering, of giving a form of pattern, we do perform a moral operation-- not necessarily in the religious ethical sense, but it's a matter of choice. It's a matter of accepting and rejecting certain aspects of a given experience.

Incidentally, the novel always looks backward. I guess that was said last night. It's concerned with what has been and through what has been. Through extracting the meaning of what has been, we create values of the day.

Now, the other thing, which I would say to enforce it, is that the novel means to communicate. It is first of all a medium of communication. I don't care if it's restricted to a small group of existentialists-- you name it. There must be a shared experience in between the process of the novel-- the process which is a novel and the audience which received.

Mr. West? Do you have anything to say, got anything to say? Your hand was up a moment ago, sir. Has your question been answered, or would you like to ask it now?

Well--

Or a new one?

Lots of them.

All right. Any of them. All of them.

All of them? Well, one--

Would you stand up please so that the audience can hear you more clearly? Thank you.

One question I had for Mr. Frohock was in relation to the moral imagination. I think Mr. Ellison answered very well. But I would like to ask him how he considers-- He made a statement about it not being a moral act to be disgusted with a pigsty or a slum. It seems to me that--

The word was exclusively moral act-- explicitly moral. And I think the root of the question-- I see what's coming.

Well, the question is whether or not it is more of a moral act to be annoyed or disgusted or want to change a slum, or is it more of another kind of act? It seems to me that when you have an imagination without some kind of morality involved, what you get is Celine and not Mr. Ellison or Richard Wright, a writing of that kind.

This is the thing that is lacking in much of literature and that is needed. I think when you abstract-- if you want to go away from the formalist critics but you want something new, what it winds up with is an investigation of the technique that Mr. Ellison uses in this section of the novel that you mentioned, which seemed--

I'd like an answer that question, by the way, whether that was apropos. It seemed to me that section of the novel-- this is another question--

INTERPOSING VOICES

--is involved with this one.

Second one.

That section of the novel was merely where the protagonist was taken to a hospital after his experience in the paint company. Is that the one you--

INTERPOSING VOICES

Well no, I would also include the place where old Rass is up on the horse throwing spears wearing God knows what kind of costume. You must remember the place, Mr. Ellison.

LAUGHTER

INTERPOSING VOICES

Wasn't the technique in that section more straightforward and more naturalistic?

And not hallucinated?

Yes. I thought you were referring particularly to that section in the hospital.

No, I wasn't.

Well, what would you posit-- continue the question-- as an activity for the critic in terms of the novel rather than the consideration of the moral imagination?

I am a victim of my own inability, I think, to attend to any one set of words. Or maybe you let me off there a little bit. One of us is tying me in knots. Anyway, would you put the main question again?

I'm sorry. It wasn't. The main question that I have is whether or not you consider the moral imagination-- with emphasis on the moral-- to be the quintessence of the novelist job and activity.

You seem to be throwing out--

Can I answer?

Yeah.

No.

And what would you put?

I won't accept a the exclusive definition there of the moral of this job. There's motive there-- may be moral in Mr. Hyman's sense of the word or Mr. Trilling's sense of the word. Moral-- I don't see any reason in the world why it can't be purely aesthetic.

Or I don't see why it has to be exclusively one or the other as in my most unfortunate metaphor-- and I wish to God I hadn't said anything-- about the pigsty and the slum. If I had just stopped with the pigsty, I'd have been well off.

LAUGHTER

INTERPOSING VOICES

Mr. Hyman?

Well, I think we had Mr. Frohock agreeing before if we had a concept of the moral large enough to include the creation of beauty as a moral act, and I thought that he was willing to join on those terms, which it seems to me any deep and meaningful use of moral would include so that if the impulse of some artists is nothing more or less than to make a beautiful thing-- whether it be a pigsty or not-- we would certainly regard that as one of the possible moral activities.

Well, I did mean that.

You're in agreement.

Mr. O'Connor?

All I feel about this, Mr. Chairman, is that we are getting involved in this business of a moralist. I think there are certain novelists who are moralists. For instance, Jane Austen is one. Chekhov is a moralist.

Their main task is in relating society as they see it to their vision of a good man and a good woman. Trollope is not a moralist. Trollope is quite content to take the ordinary conventions of a society. He's got a wider range than either of these.

He hasn't got their intensity. I think we should distinguish-- we should admit that there are certain writers who are fundamentally moralists, and there are others who are not. And I entirely fail to understand this general agreement that morality is a form of aesthetics. It isn't.

Mr. Humes

INTERPOSING VOICES

Would you stand up?

There's half a dozen different meanings for the word moral. I'm wondering whether perhaps I'd like to ask Mr. Frohock what-- he doesn't mean that the passionate imagination or the compassionate imagination, the sympathetic imagination, or even the indignant imagination-- but moral imagination, as far as I can see, it seems to me to be a very useless tool.

If the aim-- if you accepted the hypothesis that the creation of beauty is a fundamental useless act or not utilitarian in the sense that serves no usable purpose-- that's not its fundamental aim. Someone may get satisfaction out of it incidental to the creation of piece of beauty.

But if you inject the notion of moral in the philosophical sense into the use of the imagination as a creative factor in the construction of a thing of beauty, it seems to me that we're no longer talking about art. We're talking about the styling of a new ford It doesn't seem to me to be consistent with the idea of creation. I know I'm being very incoherent about this thing, and I'm glad.

LAUGHTER

Am I in the position now of having to defend the word moral whether I wanted or not?

LAUGHTER

Sink or swim.

Well, how did I ever get there?

INAUDIBLE it seems like it's awfully--

I blamed it on somebody else. As a matter of fact, I told Stanley Edgar Hyman before this group met that I never wanted him to say again that he hadn't been stooged for.

LAUGHTER

I have done everything but get down on the floor and squirm about that word moral. As for compassionate imagination, sympathetic imagination, I'm awfully worried if I get very far into that that I will end up-- I seem to be doing things that I don't mean to do here-- end up proclaiming that my favorite novelist is John Steinbeck because he has more compassion than brains.

LAUGHTER

I don't want to do it.

Mr. Simenon? Will you?

INAUDIBLE

Yes, please.

I'd like to intrude something this, and that is that it seems to me that we're heading towards-- from one side to another-- that the pie in the sky will regenerate to the INAUDIBLE , that type of thing. In the world, there is both order and there is disorder, and it is our responsibility-- each man's responsibility, as well as the artist's responsibility-- to repair, to order, to proceed.

And the aesthetic experience is something that is above the disorder of the moment. And I think, therefore, that is an argument for the moral responsibility of the writer.

All right. Mr. INAUDIBLE ? Will you speak to any aspect of this or introduce a new aspect?

I had a question.

Fine. Thank you. It seemed to me when Mr. Frohock was speaking-- I'd like to get Mr. Frohock off the hook, but I don't see my way to advise since he apparently has insight into wanting the stuff that I don't have. The idea about manners in the novel and any relevance to this discussion.

It seems to me we're drifting clean off into Plutonic orbits in this morality, beauty business. You seem to feel that Mr. Trilling doesn't want to abandon the moral imagination, and yet we have some difficulty in not doing so.

And I wondered whether this idea of memories of in the novel is the kind of medial point that Trilling sought that is an invasion or perhaps a solution. In other words, what does Trilling mean by manners and knowledge? Or if you don't know the answer, perhaps someone here does.

I recommend a good chapter in the liberal imagination on the subject, which is the transcript of a speech that he made originally at Kenyon College, I believe. I can't answer your question. I don't have that much insight into Mr. Trilling.

But it sounds to me when I read him as though he wanted to restrict the meaning of the word novel to the kind of fiction which made its capital of manners, ways of living in groups, and so forth where those were rather strictly ruled by recognized conventions. Bad word. I can't imagine a convention that was unrecognized.

Now, do you think he means by manners anything like what Eliot means by a way of life when he speaks of that and the idea of political society particularly

I suspect so. I read Eliot's book I don't know how long ago and remember only my resentment of it at the time. But I suspect that there is a slight joining of minds in that direction. It's only a suspicion, and I could be easily refuted by anyone who has Eliot and INAUDIBLE at his fingertips.

Yes, yes.

I know that from something Mr. Frohock said, that he felt that if we had another sort of criticism or a different sort of criticism, a criticism of some kind, a novelist like Sinclair Lewis would be more highly regarded. I wish he would tell me what I can't see. I feel that Sinclair Lewis to many readers today is just dull.

I don't see how any kind of criticism can make them change their minds about it being being dull. But if they don't change their minds, why are they going to be interested, and why are they going to read it? I'd like some hint about what this kind of criticism could be and how it would operate.

So I think this is quite different from the kind of criticism that enables some people to understand what they previously didn't understand so to find something interesting simply because they're given a wider web, which I don't think would be at all the case about the type of criticism you would have to have, and it's possible, here.

Well, once again, why do I sit down?

LAUGHTER

Would anybody else like to talk? My point would be-- my point was-- that Sinclair Lewis does not, if I'm right, have the lowest state that he has on the critical ladder because of his dullness. And the question of his dullness hasn't been in most criticism of issue.

The issue has been that as far as literary form was concerned, his novels were, if you like, uninteresting to the critic. Now, maybe that's wrong. That is, maybe I've misunderstood the critic.

Do you feel then the critic should explain why so many readers do find Lewis dull?

I think that would be a good thing if somebody did it. I wouldn't mind at all, but you're not under the impression that a novelist's dullness keeps him from being read.

No. Are you?

LAUGHTER

Not in this day INAUDIBLE

LAUGHTER

And I would say the same for certain pages of, say, Albertine in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I happened to spend a year of my life making sure that a piece of coral rock out in the Pacific Ocean would not move. The Japanese didn't want to move it, but we couldn't go away.

It was one of the rarest opportunities I've ever had for reading, and I had the Random House two volume Proust out of the chaplain's library.

LAUGHTER

That's why you get books. It's the only place you can get books, so that's where it came from. And I kept it for a long, long time, and I read myself assiduously to sleep with it every night. And it was some time before a pair of my fellow defenders of that country admitted to me that they had been taking my bookmark night after night and putting it back in the text INAUDIBLE.

LAUGHTER

I don't know if that's answering the question, but then as I said, I'm not quite clear about the significance of the question.

Well, I was thinking particularly of the novel since the war. The novel that you seem to think has become so subjective -- too subjective, too much within --

I wasn't aware that that was what I was saying. I don't feel-- I feel that, on the contrary, the novel since the war-- since the last war in Europe-- has become more and more objective. There is more and more a throwing over of the Joycean, Lawrence Gide, and indeed the Faulkner type of novel.

In that book which I was referring to last night, SPEAKING FRENCH, he describes the middle classes of Europe committing suicide. And he describes them in terms of a French bourgeois who comes home at night to his wife and children-- wife and daughters. Ayme thinks all the bad literature of our time derives from the fact that it's all written for women.

I don't hold with that, but he says the bourgeois comes home to his wife, and his wife says, "Faulkner SPEAKING FRENCH ." And the businessman says, "oui, Faulkner SPEAKING FRENCH ." But he's never read Faulkner. Or if he tried to read Faulkner he's always stopped in the middle because it was too difficult. And Ayme is arguing that this is intellectual suicide. It is the suicide of the bourgeoisie. And I think Ayme himself, and a number of young writers in England, are trying to get away from that. They're trying to get towards a new objectivity.

Now that doesn't mean just going back to the 19th century novel. Obviously you can't do that. You can't go back to a form of society which no longer exists. It does mean, as Mr. Lytle said earlier-- the one statement with which I found myself heartily in agreement-- that it's the relationship between the internal man, between the god within you and the reality outside you.

Yes?

This is a return to morality INAUDIBLE . Is the writer's obligation to interpret his society with a negative capability, or to repair it that somebody said earlier

Mr. Lytle?

Well, I didn't get that. Will you repeat this question? Would you stand please? It's very hard to hear you without standing.

Is the writer's obligation to interpret his society with a negative capability or to repair that society, as someone in here said today?

Well, I will-- go ahead Mr. Ellison. Yes.

Yes. I think that that-- that's the writer's business. And oh, if his business was to write and to describe reality with as much truth and-- god, here I go-- beauty, he's writing works as he's possible to achieve. And he-- if he has any other role to play, it-- it is to reveal the mystery and possibility inherent in given reality.

But beyond that, you have politicians, experts on social organization and a whole apparatus who function in their own way. But I don't-- for the life of me, I don't see how-- how a writer can do anything more than write. It's a terrifically difficult thing, this business of trying to decide what is real, what is valuable, what is-- is reality.

People who want to-- I mean, you see him again, you-- you-- well this will lead to asking the writer to get out with-- on the picket line. Which is all right with me, but it isn't writing. And I don't think the two functions should be confused. I think that-- that there is enough pain, there's enough psychological misery involved in really grappling with reality in terms of art. And that the sheer job of mastering art, especially in a time like ours when the corpus of the novel and then the technique of the novel, the ideologies of the novel is so bad.

I think that the proper thing to do is stop now and bring up these questions again at the meeting tomorrow. Mr. Campbell, are there any announcements that I have forgotten to make at the moment?

I don't think so. INAUDIBLE

Oh, we again want all the speakers to be on the stage at the table if you will. Thank you.

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.