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

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

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

That period, it can come alive any minute.

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

All right, Mr. O'Connor?

Well, I'm in the--

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

And I admit I have been reading Cruz with just as much enthusiasm as usual. I don't think that dullness bothers a certain kind of reader. It should. It's a commentary on the man who isn't bothered. To get back to the question that you asked, and which I was perhaps a bit frivolous about, I wonder if Sinclair Lewis's dullness-- which I can't find for myself in the thing like The Man Who Knew Coolidge--

Why is it it varies from book to book and from reader to reader. But I do think that there are very many people today who simply can't read Sinclair Lewis. They just find him intolerably stupid.

But I would like to ask Mr. Hyman-- this is partly the cut off my own feet-- whether that isn't because some of the books are what you would call pseudo fictions.

This seems to be the carom question.

LAUGHTER

Mr. West reproved me a little for the term pseudo fiction last night. And then, he suggested that many traditional fictions would probably be called pseduo fiction. I think as I was using it in a limited sense, it means a bad book. That is, it means a book that doesn't come alive, that hasn't grown--

LAUGHTER

--that hasn't shaped its experience into any kind of effective, any kind of imagined-- the thing I hate to keep harping on those words. But I don't seem to have any others. About Sinclair Lewis, the truth of the matter is, I suppose, I'm a little of both parties in that I've never read much of him. And I probably wouldn't and would find him dull. But that I would agree that our criticism, every variety of it has its fashionable writers.

And even if he were better, he would just not be one of its fashionable writers at the moment. That is, criticism carries along with it, as Mr. Frohock said, a certain number of writers who do what it thinks should be done. And I suspect that all of those criticisms are reductive, that all of our criticism-- certainly much of what we heard last night-- seemed to be saying that one kind of novel was it. And you can more or less throw the others out.

That is we have an alarming tendency to prescribe for the novel rather than to report what it's doing. And I suspect that probably the silliest of all critical positions is that connote position of telling the writer to go and do something else. I suspect that Mr. O'Connor, who is in the curiously ambiguous position of being both critic and novelist, can carry that off better than most of us.

And I think he played a little fast and loose with us last night in telling a great body of novel to go die, while at the same time saying that much of it he rather liked and would perhaps admit that some of his own work is actually part of that fine modern literature he was excommunicating for us. But I don't think that Sinclair Lewis in any fashion is much of a problem-- that is, he isn't much read. He's probably not the novel of the future more than Henry James. And specifically, I have nothing at all to say about him.

May I say something which will go a little bit beyond Sinclair Lewis? In the first place, we don't expect novels-- even great novels-- to stay fashionable constantly from year to year. They are encounters with experience, after all. And they are like-- and all novels, I think-- demand that we bring something to them.

What I'm trying to get at is there was a time when Sinclair Lewis did quite a bit for our awareness of ourselves as Americans, as members of society. I don't think that they are great art. We had the need at that time to have these things formulated for us. Babbitt is still a term, even though its meaning it's changed from the malignant over to the benign INAUDIBLE .

LAUGHTER

But nevertheless, he performed that function. And now, the emotion which we brought to it, and the lives of our own imagination which we brought to his words has receded. We are looking to place him elsewhere. There will be a time when-- I suspect-- when people will be reading Sinclair Lewis again and saying, this man is a classic. This is wonderful writing. And you'll have your Lewis cults just as we have our Fitzgerald cults.

I think it works that way. I think it's because the novel does communicate, because it must be fired-- like any work of art-- by the emotions, ideas, feelings of an audience. Thus, we have works which come up. They come into being and called into being through certain needs on the part of the viewer, the reader, listener. And after that need recedes, after the time changes-- and they must exist in time and can only exist in time-- they go into the veil.

Yes, please.

Some kind of person come down to Earth. I dare ask a question. A very distinguished professor emeritus of Harvard has said that, "William Faulkner writes for morons," unquote. May we have some expert comment on that?

Is there anyone who can speak to this?

Well, Mr. Collins, you are right on your feet.

LAUGHTER

Well he writes about morons. Well, he doesn't specifically aim at professors emeritus of Harvard University, obviously.

LAUGHTER

CLAPPING

And therefore, he may not attract their favorable attention. This is a big subject. We've been having big subject. Do you mean-- are you asking, essentially, whether or not William Faulkner has a moral imagination?

LAUGHTER

I think Professor--Mr.--Frohock said it.

I will say that I haven't made a living by, but I've supplemented my income by, giving a little talk around entitled-- just because of this problem-- entitled William Faulkner moralist, you see. To prove-- and any author who is a moralist-- the fact that I say is unproven-- but any author who is a moralist, we assume is not writing for morons because I think we assume that morons, at least the courts do, assume that they are neither eligible for officers candidate school nor are exempt in time of war and are not--

LAUGHTER

--and are not to be held totally responsible. They are frequently wards of the court or ward-- they are assigned people to take care of them as wards. No. William Faulkner, I think-- I'm naturally in a prejudiced position, here, because if I said I like him, this place would be in a category that you brought up. And I don't want to place myself there. The rest is up to you. But I think that without any doubt, whatever the Faulkner is an issue here.

He is not the newest breed of novelist. He wrote in an earlier period. But I think one of the reasons for his present popularity, for the enormous attention that he is receiving, is that the times have changed-- as Mr. Ellison suggested and he somehow seems, to more readers, to be speaking to them. And I think one of the reasons that he has been accused of writing for morons-- though I really don't take that very seriously.

I think he's been accused of writing for people who want to read filth. And this doesn't limit itself to morons. -- I think that William Faulkner has very-- fortunately for us at the moment, he wrote a kind of thing that wasn't extremely comprehensible at first glance to readers trained in another tradition. So that I find that the people who are his strongest supporters now are-- among his strongest supporters-- are the students who are, we hope, from whom the writers of the future will come.

They don't want to do just what he's doing. But they feel that among the older hands who have been making a living at this for some time, here is the man who's doing closer to what they are trying to do than other writers have been doing. And I believe that his revival is close to the center of what we've been discussing earlier today. And that is the question of reality, and organization, and whether or not-- and the question of last night-- whether or not the novel is popular, and should reach a large audience, and all the rest.

Now Dos Passos's USA was a very popular book when it came out. And this rose from the middle classes though he is not middle class. And it was read by the middle classes. And it seemed to me-- speaking to Mr O'Connor's point of last evening-- it seems to me that Dos Passos fitted in with a time period and had a great boom. To me-- and I like Dos Passos. I remember once I didn't like him-- past tense. I remember once when Big Money, the third of the trilogy, came out, I went to a bookstore in the morning, rented it-- this was in the depression, which the book was about.

And I thought I'd just glance at it that morning and found that I had finished it before I ate again. And this last summer, I tried to look over another volume of the trilogy thinking to assign it to some students. And over a period of a week of desperate struggle, I was unable to get more than halfway through it. Now, this has been presumed. Maybe it's just a solipsistic thing. Maybe just I have changed. But I don't think so. I think the times have changed. And I think that kind of thing is not of such interest.

Now there was a thing in one sense less organized-- if you can ever say that what we recognize as art is not organized-- but certainly much more loosely organized. It had presented no difficulties to the reader except problems of endurance, which have increased, as I say. Whereas Faulkner, writing in approximately the same period-- a little bit earlier than that third volume-- Faulkner wrote a thing like The Sound and the Fury, which immediately brings up a problem that Mr. O'Connor dealt with last night.

That is the question of external systems and so forth. Mr. O'Connor was speaking of great deal about Joyce, and very effectively about Joyce. And though I think I-- incidentally, I think I should resume my role as moderator this evening. But in the brief time remaining, I take it this is not comment vomit. It seems to me that it's quite right now to look at Joyce with a little less awe and almost approach Mr O'Connor's position because the trouble with Joyce is that these external systems-- The Odyssey or chart of human anatomy and so forth-- are presented in what has now begun to seem to a number of readers as in a sort of niggling fashion with an ulterior purpose.

These ulterior structures have an ulterior purpose, which is in great part to show what an extremely learned man Joyce was, it seems to me. And also, they're a part of an extreme mania that he has, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out, for association, which would lead him to absurd extremes. Now for a man to present a technique as a pioneer is a different thing from seeing his followers take it up and adapt it, fit it to a slightly later time, and also, fit it to the lack of being a pioneer.

A pioneer seems to me to perspire and be ungraceful, whereas the follower, settling a few waves behind the first wave of pioneering, can use these things, take them more as they come, fit them in, mesh the thing together, melt it down, and not use it so obviously. And in connection with these ulterior systems, I think Sound and Fury-- since you bring up Faulkner-- is a good example. The thing has at least three elaborately worked out ulterior external systems, which no critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed.

And yet, readers have liked-- some readers have liked it. And I think a growing number have liked it. Many of the students and would-be, hopeful writers that we speak of-- that wave of the future, if that phrase isn't hasn't a bad connotation. These people have got a lot of out of The Sound and the Fury. And they're what we would have to accept as so-called good writers-- good readers, I mean-- adequate readers.

They're not people who are just overjoyed solely with Forever Amber. And they are able to go away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling somewhat good, feeling they've got some their money's worth in part-- a good many of them are. Now, Mr. O'Connor has asked that authors be less self conscious and less intellectual. Joyce seems to him overly intellectual. And this would seem-- he seems so to me.

But, at the same time, Mr. O'Connor asks that the reader be extremely intellectual, and that if the novel has in it systems and things which are not subject to the reader's immediate conscious and intellectual examination, that the novel is a failure. And I'm of the opinion that there's a middle ground here where the author shouldn't be so self-conscious and intellectual and planned and smelling of the lamp as Joyce, a lamp with a reflector to show how much he's a poor figure, but a lamp which he wants to smell up to show he's spent the time near it. The author can do a little less of that.

And I think though the reader these days is likely to be a little intellectual, after all, he's been able to read James's prefaces and other things, as Mr. Frohock has pointed out, still, I think it's possible for a reader, whom we might call a good reader, one we accept as who knows any more than Arnold's suggestion that the best people in literary matters-- if this reader goes away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling good, feeling that something's come from this, if he doesn't know all the intellectual systems on which it's organized, who cares?

The novel, for example, has several-- involves four days. These are the days of Holy Week. It has Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter.

And throughout these-- the days-- the events assigned to these days, the symbolic and traditional operations of those days recur but so melted into the realism that Mr. O'Connor asks for that the readers have not been aware that on the Thursday, the boy does a lot of washing of his hands and so forth, though feet is done in the Bible. This is the way the author changes it. And there's harrowing of Hell and other things that go through this thing. But they're not sticking their heads up too far.

And then the title, following Joyce-- this, I believe, is an author who went to school with Joyce. And as Walt Whitman said something about the breadth of my students' shoulders only tests, I think, the breadth of my own shoulders, Faulkner, I think, has maybe taken Joyce's thing-- this is blasphemy to say-- and maybe done it better. The other pattern is as with Joyce, who took the-- who gave a title to his book to steer the reader to The Odyssey, so Faulkner takes a title from the fifth act of Macbeth, famous speech by Macbeth, and then organizes the book around this speech so that one of the monologues deals a great deal with "out, out brief candle."

The second monologue involves a great deal of life being a walking shadow. Quentin Compson, before he found himself up somewhere near the Brighton abattoir here in Charles River, walks his shadow around a great deal. And in the third monologue, the poor player struts and frets upon the stage. And in the end, where the peak of sound with Jason, or with the Idiot, and the fury with Jason, where they reach their peak, the novel ends with showing that it signifies nothing for these people, who fit into the novel as one of the big-- a novel that deals with one of the big subjects of our time, which is love or the lack of love in its broadest sense. And the novel has made very clear throughout that these children are being-- are suffering, or as the novel says two times, "poisoned" by the lack of affection from the parents, lack of support and lift from the hypochondriac mother and the cynical and alcoholic father.

And this novel is a moralistic novel saying that that ain't right. And one of the ways it shows this is that the three interior monologues are also organized, as Joyce organized parts around the Chart of Human Anatomy. In this, they're organized around the Chart of Human Personality but as laid out by Freud so that the idiot's speech, so-called, the one assigned to the idiot, draws very carefully on Freud's definition of the id.

The second monologue is very carefully based on Freud's definition as available to Faulkner in translation. And he did read a lot of Freud then, and he has this kind of mind. Based on the ego, Jason, the one who wants to repress all pleasure, who's the only one who cares what the community thinks, who in their three brothers' concentration on their sister is the one who hates her and who is against all voluptuousness, whether it leads to information or not.

CHUCKLING

This-- Jason is strictly based on the superego. And such details as the idiot's trying to break out of the fence through the gate, and as a result, being brought in and by Jason being castrated, this is how the textbook, too, that famous portal that Freud set up in his spatial figure when he was moving from his hydraulic images to the geographical ones, this is the kind of episode which means something on the realistic level. Anybody with an idiot in the family, 33 years old with a mind of a 3-year-old, is going to be interested, as Jason is, in keeping him back of the house, inside the fence, not out presumably, or probably not actually molesting schoolgirls.

But still, the thing has a life at another level. And I see no real harm in this. If the novel is able to live since 1929 with all kinds of people treading over it and dealing with it in every way, and these systems are so completely buried that all they've done is guide the author maybe and guide the reader perhaps subtly, or at least give him a feeling there's some unity here, I see no objection in doing this because the author has in two ways not paraded this learning. He has not made it stick out in the novel to such an extent as Joyce did. And he has not slyly said to an equivalent of Mr. Gilbert, yes, if you look farther, you'll see really something here.

The analogy here, I think, is possibly that between the horse and horseman. The-- though I don't want the reader to be in every way equated to the horse because though readers are sharply different from authors, there are some readers who can approach being-- approach some authors. But I think that just as a horse not knowing where he and the horseman are going, as anyone who rides at all knows, is a little more happy, subtle things are conveyed by the hands, knees, and seat of the pants. And the horse somehow senses that the author, the horseman, is-- he'll change in a minute at the next jump.

The horseman is aware of where he's going and knows the technique for getting the horse to go there. And the horse has a happier day. He had-- the ride he enjoys more.

And I think that if an author, in dealing with this rapid flux that passes and giving it some kind of shape, has something that makes him-- I hope he has an internal smile, not a kind of leer or sneer. But if he's happily smiling to himself that he's got a gimmick now that will work, and if he doesn't intrude it too much, I think art works in subtle ways and that somehow, some readers, and apparently in growing numbers, have begun to sense that maybe something's going on here. Now if-- I do not believe that they buy this book and read it so that they can end up with a kind of mystery of the sort of the lady or the tiger. So when they get through, they say, well, what happened in this book?

They may not know all these things happened. And because I say they happened doesn't prove they do. They may not happen there at all.

But I do think that because the author has had this kind of plan and has been able to use it and adapt it, as Mr. Ellison said last night in the roundtable, taking these new techniques and the novels looking backward but not trying to move there, it seems to me that here is a possible place where some of this adaptation has been made.

And if the reader does not know when he gets through everything that has happened, that's all right. But on the other hand, to return to your professor emeritus of Harvard, it is quite true that if the reader approaches this expecting a straight-out naturalistic with a capital N chronological order of the kind that Faulkner has in As I Lay Dying, which for many years was his most admired book because the woman died. The family tried to take her to a burying ground, and in the end they got there.

CHUCKLING

This novel had a crystal, linear clarity, if there's such a thing, which made many readers say, Faulkner can't write a novel, but he wrote one here. Well, Faulkner's-- measured by those devices, these other novels are certainly chaotic. It doesn't even run Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But it has another kind of order.

To take another example, Malcolm Cowley, who's in great part responsible for much of Faulkner's-- well, for part of Faulkner's boom in this country, or at least making the books available through the Viking Portable, has felt that Faulkner so abandoned the naturalistic novel that he needed to be rewritten. The canute thing operated with Mr. Cowley. So Mr. Cowley and the Viking Portable Faulkner has written the only good Faulkner novel.

It has a chronological order. We start with Indians. We get early settlers. These are snippets from various places. And we come up to the very present.

Now this has a beauty all its own, which has been imposed by Mr. Cowley. On the assumption that William Faulkner in his individual works had no aesthetic plan whatever, as in The Sound and the Fury, and that the important thing is he's dealt with one county to a considerable extent, but that it's so hard for the readers to find this out that now in this one volume they can do it. And so the important thing is the history of the county, which you can get from some-- also from some volumes prepared by the WPA.

CHUCKLING

Mr. Cowley's also said that William Faulkner never wrote a unified novel. In other words, he writes for morons. And he cites the-- as Light in August, in which the two main protagonists, the main woman and the main man, never meet.

Now this is a Procrustean bed that I don't propose to make the novel take for its lodging this night or any other. The novel has a theme which requires that these two characters never meet, a theme that has to do with time. One of the characters is embedded in the past. One is morbidly fixed on the future.

And-- no, excuse me. The one doesn't meet. There are three characters here. The man we just spoke of frozen in the past, and the woman I just spoke of, the major one, eternally in the present, using figures from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

This is an author who may write for morons. But he's read the poems which are popular with professors emeritus in general. And he knows them rather well.

And the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" sets up this girl as running through eternal present. And then another woman, who is killed by the man, is frozen in the future. Now this-- and to mention strictly parenthetically a thing that Mr. Frohock referred to in The Inferno, where some characters there have their heads turned backward, it's not really in connection. But to give you an idea of how really moronic this author is and how many schemes he uses which are not intellectually available to the reader without-- I've been reading them over and over again for money, you see? This is different.

In this novel, when the man who is embedded in the past kills the woman who is fixed on the future, he cuts her throat in a scene which rather horrified some people. And when her body is carried out of this building, which is burning naturally, and this openly-- blanket in which it's been brought out is open in the yard, we see that her head is turned backward on the body. And there are some readers of a squeamish sort who asked whether or not this twist was necessary.

LAUGHTER

And the point is that the people in The Inferno passage that Mr. Frohock spoke of were Cassandra, Tiresias, and others, whose sin was they looked too far in the future. So this woman who looked too far in the future, when her throat is cut and she's brought out, her head is turned backward on her body. Now this is maybe morbidly the author having games with himself.

There is an element in all of this of the author's being the kind of person who could satisfactorily own a stolen Mona Lisa, in which he knows that everyone is looking for it. Those so-and-sos out there, and I'm the man who knows where it is. He can't tell his wife. He can't tell anybody else. But he's-- he knows it, and this is fine.