Annotations for Program: Lecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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.

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

LAUGHTER

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHUCKLING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUGHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APPLAUSE

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.

Our first speaker tonight, whose title is "Paperback Books and the Writer," is the assistant to the president of New American Library, which is responsible for a large portion of the books of all types and qualities which you see in markets ranging from the bookstores and drugstore to the Stop and Shop. Ms. Hilda Livingston.

APPLAUSE

Thank you, Mr. Collins. I'm going to sound a rather low commercial note in the discussion tonight because I'm going to talk about money, and I'm going to talk about readers. And I'm going to talk about who reads books and why they read them. And now that I've defined my terms, I will start.

What I want to talk about is a kind of revolution in merchandising that has induced a cultural revolution in reading in this country. And if you think this sounds pretentious, I hope I can convince you by the time I'm finished that it is, in effect, something that we're all experiencing and something of the utmost importance to everyone who wants to write or to everyone who reads.

The mass audience for books, for paper bound books, is an enormous one. But the mass audience itself is no new phenomenon in this country. Paper bound books have existed as early as 1800 in one form or another. Dime novels were paper bound books of their own that had tremendous vogue.

National magazines in the late 19th century and early 20th century brought the works of a great many very, very talented writers to a very wide audience, and newspaper syndication and book clubs have also brought books to a very wide audience. But the new and important aspects of paper bound distribution is that it has immensely multiplied the size of this audience and enormously varied the kinds of books available.

Paper bound book publishing as a kind of marriage of book publishing and magazine distribution, and I thought I'd tell you a little bit about how it works so that we can follow one another. Paper bound books are distributed like magazines. They are sold at 100,000 retail outlets throughout the country.

And as Mr. Collins said, this includes newsstands, drugstores, railroad terminals, supermarkets, and we even have a couple of funeral parlors on our list. Everywhere you find magazines and practically everywhere you find people, you'll find paper bound books. In 1952, 250 million copies of paper bound books were sold, and this represented about 1,000 titles-- 1,000 new titles.

Because of our discussion this morning, which painted a rather bleak view for new writers, particularly writers who were unfortunate enough to be aspiring novelists, I thought I would tell you that from where we sit in the paper bound book industry the news is very cheering indeed because as an industry, we published and sold last year almost 200 million copies of new novels.

And by new, I may be stretching a point. They were reprints, but they were contemporary novels that had been published within the past two or three years so that certainly a vast new audience has been built up for fiction in book form, and it's an audience of the most varied and catholic taste.

To describe the kinds of books that are available in paper bound editions would be a directory of the leading writers of the 20th century, as well as a great many of the older writers of our time. Fiction ranges from Louis Bromfield to Tennessee Williams. European writers include George Simenon, Moravia, Flaubert.

The nonfiction title in the paper bond industry is steadily increasing in importance. Nonfiction and paper bound books includes history, science, anthropology, philosophy, Shakespeare, the classics, et cetera. I don't want to sound too commercial, but the New American Library, which publishes mentor books which are entirely nonfiction of a rather high order, has sold 10 million copies of nonfiction in the past six years.

These were 35 cent books that people walked up to newsstands to buy, and the two most popular titles in this series are Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict, which has sold a half a million copies, and the W.H.D. Rouse translation of Homer's Odyssey.

But what does this all mean? These figures are impressive and substantial, but what does it mean to the writer particularly and to the reader? The thing that it means to me most precisely is a refutation that I long to make this afternoon when I listened to Mr. Little who talked about the aristocracy of art.

I'm perfectly willing to admit the aristocracy of art in the minds of the creators because talent is confined to a very elect few, but our whole publishing experience has proved quite conclusively that there is no limitation on the aristocracy who responds to good books.

We have had the most-- and all reprint published shows have had the most-- extraordinary success with truly good books at low prices. William Faulkner has sold over 6 million copies in 25 cent editions in the past five years. And this can be reflected in a whole stream of other authors of absolutely first rate-- James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and George Simenon, and a great many others.

The fact is that although you hear a good deal about the so-called mass audience and the so-called class audience, I don't believe there is any such animal. The mass audience in this country, the audience that's serviced by paper bound books, are people who have the same curiosities, the same aspirations, and the same interests in their world as the people who can afford to spend $3 for books.

But there are two things that separate them. First, they only have a quarter to spend instead of $3. And secondly, they live in places where there are no bookstores and where most of the books available are available only through paper bound editions.

This brings me, again, to the housekeeping of book publishing, but it's something you have to understand to realize the significance of this revolution in reading. There are something like 2,000 honest to God bookstores in this whole country, and there are many, many substantial cities where you could hunt very, very hard and couldn't find a bookstore.

I had an experience like this in Youngstown, Ohio, about two years ago. I was kept waiting for two hours by a gentleman. This never happens, but it did that night. And so I decided I would case the bookstore situation. And there were two department stores in Youngstown that sold books. There is no bookstore.

And I went to the department store whose slogan was, "The Greatest department Store in Youngstown," because I thought I'd start at the top. And I asked for the book department, and it was in the third floor. So I went to the third floor, and I couldn't find it.

And they said, oh, it's in the gift shop. So I went to the gift shop, and they had six tables of books. Five of them were children's books. They had the best assortment of the Honey Bunch series that I've ever seen under one roof, and they had a wonderful collection of paper books, linen books, that infants can eat without serious after effects.

They had one table of illustrated books that could be easily given to anyone who couldn't read. They were art books, cookbooks, and the sort of book you might give a hostess whose tastes you weren't very sure of. So I said to the clerk, well, where's the current fiction and nonfiction? She said, oh, we don't get much call for that sort of thing.

So I said, well, what happens if someone in Youngstown wants to read a new novel? She said, well, they go to Cleveland. It's only 20 miles away.

LAUGHTER

Well, this is a very sad story if you're a writer, incidentally, and the only happy note in the whole thing is that the independent magazine wholesaler in Youngstown who distributes about 70% of the paper bond books available sold 700,000 paper bound books that year. So the people in Youngstown are reading books. They're just reading them at a quarter and not at $3, but they never read them at $3.

Mr. Sloane was absolutely right this morning when he said that the market for fiction has increased enormously in the past 25 years. It may have increased in different ways. The big emphasis may be now in paper bound books, but it's a very, very broadening category of people who are reading books.

Well, what does this vast mass audience have to offer a writer-- a writer of fiction, especially? First, an audience. It's my hunch that most writers write to be read. And in the mass audience, he finds this happy condition most immediately.

As you know, the average first printing of a novel, especially a new novel by an unknown author, may be as low as 5,000 copies. Well, the average first printing of a paper bound novel is at least 200,000 copies and sometimes goes as high as 500,000, so the immediate distribution of a book is far more penetrating in a paper bound edition than it is in a trade edition.

Secondly, it offers him an audience with a highly spontaneous response to what the writer has to say. It's an audience that's completely or almost completely uncluttered by literary cliches, conversational fads, bestseller lists, or what looks good on a coffee table.

Paper bound books really don't lend much social prestige to the people who has them in his hand. If you get a paper bound book the chances are you read it because there's really very little other aclad to be achieved by parting with a quarter.

APPLAUSE

And the third thing that it offers the writer is a burgeoning audience for the writer's future books. Many people have been seduced into reading books as a result of paper bound editions.

There are not only a great lack of bookstores in this country, but the whole convention of selling books-- and I do hope there are no booksellers in the audience, because if there are, this doesn't apply to Cambridge-- is one that is hedged around with restrictions.

Many bookstores resembles cathedrals of higher education. And for a person of little literary sophistication to enter such a place is frequently a rather trying experience. Well, this doesn't happen on a newsstand. You go to a newsstand for a pack of cigarettes, and you buy it. And something attracts you on the book rack, and maybe you pick it up.

You go down to get your favorite magazine, and it's all sold out. And you want very much to read something because it's raining, so you pick up a book instead. And once you have read a book and find out that it doesn't bite back, the chances are you're much more fair game for future books.

I promised not to tell this story because it wasn't very intellectual, but I think I'll tell it anyway because it demonstrates this point. We got a letter from a man in Tennessee, which has been used extensively and will sound like a handout. But it really happened and I read it. And I have a copy at home.

It said, "Just read The Odyssey. Boy, that guy Homer sure can write. Do you have any other books by him?" So I sat down and wrote him a long note about The Iliad. But this is a very, very interesting example of people who stumble on to reading in paper bound editions and are captivated and go on reading other books.

I have another example that's more significant, and that is Patterns of Culture had been out of print in the Houghton Mifflin edition for several years when we released it as a mentor edition. And a year after it had been available at $0.35, Houghton Mifflin went back to press with the second printing.

And they took a large ad in The Publishers Weekly to say that the only thing new added to this book's history in this year had been the paper bound edition, which apparently had attracted enough people to the book so that they were willing, after sort of sampling it at $0.35, to go out and buy it at $3.

Because I'd be deceiving you if I told you that the paper bound edition is as durable as a 35 cent edition or as easy to read or as attractive in many cases. So the paper bound edition has had in a large variety of instances a very salubrious effect on the same title at a higher price and more immediately on the author's future sales on future books.

Well, who reads paper bound books? I think I know, but I wanted to make sure, so I did a little research today. I went to Jordan Marsh to see Mr. Brame who's a very knowledgeable bookseller. And I said, who reads paper bound books? Can you pick a paper bound book customer when they come to the Jordan Marsh book department?

He said, well, maybe you could have eight years ago, but you can't today. So either books are getting better or people are getting worse. But anyway, everybody is reading paper bound books today. College students read them in great numbers. About 180 of our 450 titles a year is required reading in schools and colleges.

They're enormously used by the Army, the Navy, the State Department, housewives, college professors, businessmen-- there's as diverse an audience for paper bound books as there is for trade books. And what's the special appeal of the paper bound book to the so-called new reader of books?

First, I think the availability is probably the most important aspect. You can get a paper bound book as easily as you can a pack of cigarettes or a magazine. Secondly, it's a low price, which puts it in the reach of many people who have never been able to afford to buy all the books they wanted to.

And then, as I mentioned before, the extremely high attraction of the self-service operation, which makes it very easy for a person to look at a book get some idea of what's in it, and if he doesn't like it, reject it with the least loss of face. I heard something very interesting in this connection from a librarian in Washington just yesterday before I came down.

Libraries are using increasingly more paper bound books because it gives them a good deal more money to spend for reference books and nonfiction. But I meant they're using a great many more paper bound editions in fiction, particularly light fiction entertainment and that sort of thing.

Well, this librarian told me they have two copies of Daisy Miller in their circulating shelves, and that just for the fun of it, she thought she'd check the circulations on the two editions. They have a trade edition, and they have a paper bound edition.

In the past year, the trade edition, which is the cloth bound big book, went out twice. It was borrowed twice, and the paper bound edition was borrowed 19 times, so that, in a sense, the appeal and the kind cozy familiarity of a paper bound edition is almost as potent in a library as it is on a newsstand.

I would be doing you all an injustice if I pretended that the format which has helped spur the sales of paper bound books has not also been a hindrance. Paper bound books, because they sell themselves, have to contain their own selling story.

As you all know, paper bound books have pictures on their covers, and they usually have descriptions of what's in the book on the front cover and on the back cover. And we all know of the ghastly abuses of the artwork and copy which has appeared on paper bound books.

I think this has been brought out by sales figures, that not only are publishers taking a much more stringent attitude for these lapses in good taste, but in the long run, the reader who reads solely for the promise of sensation on a cover and fails to find it within the book doesn't respond quite so visibly to this misleading bait in the future.

As I said, one of the big excitements of the paper bound field is that it has proved in publishing something that has not yet been demonstrated as widely in other mass media, such as movies, radio, and television, and that is there is no such thing as a six-year-old audience.

The most extraordinarily profound books sell well, and the most trivial books sell well. But there is no kind of formula for success in fiction in paper editions. And if you think so, you are misguiding yourselves.

The amount and variety of offerings in the paper bound book field is infinite. It ranges from Mickey Spillane to William Faulkner. And Spillane sells well, and so does Faulkner. And sometimes, the same people read them both. And one is art and one is not. But this is not--

LAUGHTER

I haven't used a big word, and I've been here two days, so I thought I'd get art in, too. But this doesn't matter. The fact is they're both available, and people respond to both of them in vast quantities. And in the long run, the substantial endures, and the freakish expires. It makes a lot of noise, but when it ends, it's very dead.

This brings us to the problem of a reprint editor and his function and how he does it. Reprint editors select about 1,000 titles annually from the 10,000 that are published. They read titles and manuscripts. They read titles in galleys. They read advance copies. They read out of print copies. They frequently read books in foreign languages, which have to be translated.

And then based on their own publishing policies, they select the books that we will publish. The average reprint publishes between 80 and 100 books a year, so it's a very, very selective process to winnow down from the 10,000 books available the 80 or 100 you choose to distribute to this mass audience.

And what does the reprint editor look for? Again, I repeat there's no formula. There's no way of picking a book that will do well.

And I suspect it's very close to what Mr. Sloane may tell you about the trade editors' problem in what to publish because the big search in the reprint editor's mind when he reads all of these books is for the book that communicates to a reader-- not so much in terms of style, not in terms of format, not in terms of allegory or novel, but a book that has something pertinent to say that a reader will understand.

And it has been this true communication that has established the most substantial successes in the paper bound field. And that's why I think that it's so important for new writers or writers of novels to realize that art is good, but other things will also suffice a conviction, the genuineness of experience which Mr. Ellison has mentioned so eloquently.

And something to say that people reciprocate and respond to is what, in our experience, determines success in a very wide audience. There has been a good deal of experimentation in paper bound editions. I'm sure you've all seen New World Writing, Discovery, New Voices, The Partisan Review Reader, and there are probably many more.

These are books which tend to do what the little magazine does, but on a much larger scale. They offer literary hospitality to the new writer of talent, the novelist, the short story, writer, and the poet. And they use the vehicle of mass distribution to bring these people to a very wide audience because one of the enchanting things about this audience is that it doesn't matter whether the writer is well known or unknown or whether the book is new or old.

If they haven't read it before, it's new, and they're much more concerned about the author has to say than what is said about him. You'll hear a lot-- and if you are a writer, you may have even said a lot-- about the influence of the success of reprint fiction, on the kind of fiction that is published in trade editions.

Mr. Sloane could tell you much more about this than I can because he's a trade editor. But we have found this to be a much more minor note than is generally suspected. Certainly, there are prefabricated novels. The pulp writer has always existed in one form or another. Many of these formula novels may have a temporary one shot success.

But as I said before and the big thing that I would like to leave with you is that the enduring success is the Faulkner. It's the Caldwell. It's the Farrell. It's the Simenon and the Ellison and the writers of genuine conviction who write from experience who succeed in the long haul.

In the long run, magazine distribution, colorful covers, exciting blurbs, and low prices are all devices that bring many books to many readers. But what makes these books stay with the readers and what makes them win millions of other readers is what's in the book itself.

There's a phrase in publishing I can't stand because publishers always use it to describe something they can't analyze. It's called word of mouth. When a very peculiar book suddenly runs away and sells a million copies, they say, well, word of mouth did it. And when a very good book that gets a good deal of advertising promotion lays a big egg, they say, well, we didn't get the word of mouth started.

Well, I'm afraid I have to use it again in paper bound books because it's true-- it exists-- that all of the techniques that I've described rather briefly this evening that tend to package a book and bring it to the attention of the potential reader are just techniques. What makes the book a success and a real success is what's in the book itself.

And what's in the book itself can be an infinite variety of messages and experiences that can range from voice operas to tall stories. It can range from anthropology and philosophy to Alberto Moravia.

But it is essentially what is in the book that has developed-- wins friends for the book and that wins the friends for the author. And this, I think, is the important thing to remember about writers and paper bound books because it's perfectly true.

You can't sort of fool people, and the vast audiences that have been won for paper bound books in the past 13 years-- and this is a rather adolescent industry with lots of goosebumps still on it-- have been won because of the genuine merit of the majority of titles offered in this field.

When paper bound books first appeared on the American scene in 1939, they were a lot different than they are today. The early lists, if you look back on them, were largely mysteries and Westerns and popular bestsellers. There was very little experimentation done with new writers. There were almost none of the foreign writers, and there was entirely no nonfiction, except for the imported Penguin editions.

The character of the industry has changed enormously in the past 13 years because as of last year, 20% of the titles offered in paper bound editions were nonfiction-- serious nonfiction-- and they are substantial categories of plays, poems, short stories, humor, et cetera.

I'm sorry to belabor Mr. Liddell because I think he's so charming, but I do want to say that the aristocracy in art in the mass audience rests in the communion between the writer and the reader, and this is a communion in which we have the utmost faith for the future.

Now I finished my talk, and I want to tell you a newsflash that I should have started off with. We, as a company and as an industry and writers as a whole, won a great victory today. Six months ago, the chief of police in Youngstown, Ohio, banned 335 books from the newsstands because he said they were obscene.

I don't have the complete list with me, but they were a very representative selection of the best contemporary writing-- Faulkner, Steinbeck, Farrell, Moravia, Dos Passos, Simenon, and many, many others.

LAUGHTER

And just a few minutes ago before I got here, my office called me. The New American Library brought suit against the police chief. There were 11 of our titles on this list. We objected to a police officer taking this power of censorship into his own hands.

Our position was that the courts are the place to try the obscenity of books, and we don't think that police chiefs or ladies clubs or other well-intended people should take this rather important function to their own bosoms, so we brought suit. And it's been going on for six months.

And it was a great hazard because, as many people pointed out, we could lose. But I'm delighted to say that we won. And I think this is a great blow for freedom. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Thank you, Ms. Livingston. Our next speaker has, as his subject, he editor and the author. He is the Editorial Vice President of Funk and Wagnalls, Mr. William Sloane.

APPLAUSE

I'm not going to read all of this formal documentation, just a piece of it. I got to this assembly only a little over 24 hours ago, and I must say that they have been a fruitful 24 hours for me.

I think I've been compelled to re-examine, in one fashion or another, almost all of the operating precepts by which I think I live and work and also a picture of myself, which every man forms as he goes through this world.

What follows is a somewhat modified version of what I was going to say when I came up here. I believe myself to be a publishing editor as well as a publisher-- more important to be an editor perhaps in certain ways than to be a publisher.

But I have heard a view of the patterns of modern writing expressed--

Bill, this is a very bad hall. It's a fine hall except acoustically, and I think you'll speak a little louder. We've had trouble with this.

All right. Can you hear this?

You don't need to overdo it.

APPLAUSE

OK. I've heard a lot of opinions expressed about the structure and nature of the modern novel in the last 24 hours, and this is merely a report from somebody who has been a midwife to a few of them, sometimes under rather grueling circumstances, including snowstorms and bankruptcy.

Modern novels have to be published. Otherwise, they don't get read. Somebody has to publish them. The publisher, at least in publishing a novel, does not intend it as an act of introspection on the part of the author.

He is not concerned, basically, with how the author feels when he reads his own printed pages silently over to himself after the printer has delivered the finished copy. He is indeed interested in how everybody else feels, including the critics, but most of all, the people with a certain sum of money in their pockets who intend to part with the money in exchange for the novel.

Now, it's no secret that very large numbers of people in this country write. I mean, surely there must be quite a few people in this audience who are even now writing something. I am, and I'm sure that many of you must be.

And a process is required by which to select from all that is written that which is to be said. In terms of a word which I've heard often here in the last 24 hours, in terms of society, somebody has to make this decision.

Basically, the editor of the initial publishing house makes this decision, and it's a little bit about him and how he makes this decision and why he makes this decision that I want to talk tonight. It is, to give you, really, the theme of this, at the editor's desk that the future reader and the writer first meet each other.

Unfortunately for the best principles of business management, nobody in the book industry has been able to invent a way of rearranging and reorganizing it so that the editor is not the central factor in the process of publishing. There is every inducement to reorganize our industry so that editors would not be the central fact in it. I will come to the reasons why this is economically desirable later.

The editor is generally considered by writers to be everything from adult to the authentic mouthpiece of God. And his words are either treasured or excoriated, and every shade of opinion in between. A man doesn't have to be an editor very long to be nervously aware of the fact that he is going to play as many roles in the course of his life as there are writers who submit material to him.

However, back in the 19th century, which to a certain extent-- at least I think Mr. O'Connor correctly perceives to have been one of the golden ages of fiction publishing as well as fiction writing, the situation is rather different from the way it is now. Publishing was a much smaller operation.

And in general, the central editor of a publishing house was also its owner, or at least he controlled it. He could set the tone of voice. He could set the quality, caliber, and character of the operation in which he was interested. He was, in a sense, a very cultivated and civilized member of society to begin with, but he was also very powerful.

The book itself in those days enjoyed a relatively more central status than it does now-- again, using a word I've heard here over and over again-- than it does now in our society, the analysis of which I believe could perhaps better be left to sociologists.

In any event, the book editor enjoyed an enormous prestige, and he was almost always the president of the company. People like Mr. Henry Holt-- later, contemporary perhaps, George H. Doran many, many, many others. These men were their houses. What they thought about writing, publishing was what the house thought about it, and authors were not compelled to go there or not to go there but at least their houses were themselves.

Nowadays, in all but very small houses the editor, even the central editor, is essentially an employee. And thus, you have a situation in which the decisions about what is to be said and not said in our time is divided between a man who advises another man that this or that ought to be said, and the other man who says, I will or won't find the money to do this depending on how persuasive you are about the necessity for this matter. Now, this is a complex matter but except as I say for small houses almost all large publishers are headed by businessmen, and almost all important editors are employees.

During the period in which this transition was taking place, a certain group of very distinguished editors lived and worked in the United States, and I intend to quote from one of them both favorably and adversely in a minute, who occupied in a sense a very dominant position. They could really force their houses to follow their publishing bent even if they didn't own them, and even if they weren't on the board of directors or a corporate officer.

However, this situation is increasingly less common in American publishing today. To this reason, I still feel and believe deeply that it is important that as many small publishers as possible should survive the fortunes of our time because in them reposes a certain freedom and integrity of action which is impossible in a large corporate structure.

Now, I thought before I came up here how to explain what it is that distinguishes an editor from, let us say, the head of the bookkeeping department of a publishing house or the head of the sales department perhaps even. And finally, I hit upon a word. If I don't make this plain, I hope you'll all ask questions later. This word is interest. The one distinguishing common characteristic of every effective editor that I have ever known or of which there is any written record is his capacity to be interested.

Now, almost 10 years ago I was associated in another publishing house with a friend of mine, a woman named Helen Taylor. And the two of us became quite enamored of what you might call the folklore of our craft, and we wrote a series of advertisements about what we thought publishing was all about. And Miss Taylor wrote an advertisement for the Saturday Review of Literature on what an editor is. And in a decade with one exception, which I will also present to you, I haven't heard anything any better than this.

"We have been reflecting on the work of some important people on our staff. One of them just went by the door with a bulging briefcase, probably going home to get two days' work done in one night. We'll tell you the whole truth if we can about what an editor in a publishing house is and what he does.

An editor is a man with a finger to the wind. He reads all important periodicals and newspapers, and when he thinks a book on a certain subject is needed, he tries to find the best person to write it. This might entail anything from a telephone call to a series of investigations resembling the work of the FBI. An editor is a man who likes to read and a good thing too. He must be on speaking terms with all notable and all best-selling books currently published. He can read only a few hundred of these books a year. Therefore, he scans all book review sections carefully.

An editor is a man of hope he reads from 10 to 50 manuscripts in a week. Less than 1% of them is ever published by his house. He is also courageous and tactful, for he must reject the rest of those manuscripts often face-to-face with the author, and try to give the honest reasons.

An editor is a man with a gregarious mind and a tender regard for human nature. He works sympathetically with any number of his firm's authors. No two alike, writers being more individualistic than most people.

An editor is a friend to all literary talent and thereby leads a hunted life, for his friend's friends, and all their merest acquaintances besiege him with mistaken ideas of their own creative powers. But that doesn't stop him, let him get his hands on a manuscript with promise or a great manuscript--" see this is the day before I got the word great out of everything-- "and he is a humble and happy man. He will wrack his brain to help a writer out of a dilemma with a character or a situation. He will style it for the printer with great care or he will throw all style to the winds if the situation demands it.

An editor is a plastic surgeon to books by unprofessional writers. Book writing these days, unlike a century ago, isn't limited to people trained in literary matters. Let someone devise a new way of erecting chicken houses or let him live six months in a Persian village and the result is a book, full of facts, true but not always too well written.

That's where the editor comes in. It is he who cuts thousands of words of dead wood, organizes, tightens, reshapes sentences, puts in grammar and punctuation, and still retains the author's style. It's still the author's book too, though the author often doubts it while the process is going on.

An editor is a businessman, he arranges contracts with authors and authors' agents. He has a sharp eye for second serial and reprint possibilities for his firm's books. He wrestles with Hollywood for a good price. He has to predict sales of books too. And when he is off by the thousands as he often is, people accuse him of being a visionary or a liar and not a good businessman.

An editor is a gambling man, he will recommend that his firm publish the first, the second, and even the third book by an author, knowing full well that they will lose money. The editor is putting his chips on the books his author will write a decade or more hence, and you couldn't get any side bets in Wall Street on a proposition like that. The editor must also steel himself for the author's disappointment, whatever form of reviling or despair it may take, he must comfort and encourage him."

And she goes on to say that "the editor is also a denizen of the reference room, he has got to be a legal man, he has got to be a man of detail."

Andrew Tisement wound up with these words, "Editors have their compensations, when our friend, the manufacturing man, comes upstairs with the first copy of a book that is just off the press, he always goes to the editor whose baby it is and says, how do you like it? The editor reaches for it with a glint in his eye and says, let's see it. And they stand there both of them admiring it like a couple of fools."

Yeah. There is another statement about the business of the editor in the world of books, and this is written by a man whom I admire very much, John Hall Wheelock, who is the senior editor at Scribner's, and who contributed the preface to a book which I imagine some of you have read, which is The Collected Letters of Max Perkins. And I intend to do a slightly unfair thing in order to make a point, I want to quote a little bit from Mr. Wheelock, a little bit for Mr. Perkins, the former with approbation, the latter in spite of the fact that he was a friendly acquaintance of mine, with the opposite.

Mr. Wheelock says, "The job of editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating, and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world. Most writers are in a state of gloom a good deal of the time, they need perpetual reassurance. When a writer has written his masterpiece he will often be certain that the whole thing is worthless." Incidentally, this happens less and less frequently as time passes.

LAUGHTER

"The perpetrator of the dimmest literary effort, on the other hand, is apt to be invincibly cocksure and combative about it. No book gets enough advertising, the old superstition regarding its magic power still persists, or it is the wrong kind.

And obviously, almost every writer needs money and needs it before not after delivery of the goods. There is the writer whose manuscript proves that Shakespeare's plays are merely an elaborate system of political code. Another has written a book to demonstrate that the Earth is round but that we are living on the inside of it. Still, another has completed the novel in five volumes entitled God. Probably if not vocally expressed, the most consistent ejaculation in the editor's mind that I know of."

He then goes on to comment on Mr. Perkins' grasp of the editorial function which is beyond dispute. And says, that "Mr. Perkins had a very fine conception of the function of a publisher, he frequently stresses the fact that fiction is not mere entertainment but at its best a serious interpretation of reality." These are very nice, clean, clear words, perhaps they should have been read earlier.

"Comprehending within its scope the evil and the ugly side of things as well as the good and the beautiful, and subject to such limitations only as are imposed by the conscience of art. Where ideas are concerned, a publisher as such must not be partisan but should offer to any honest and fresh viewpoint worthily presented a chance to take its place in the free commonwealth of thought.

Is it of interest to the public? If so the public is entitled to know about it and to pass upon it. If so the public is entitled to know about it and to pass upon it. The public, not the publisher is the judge."

Now, even a man who is perhaps the greatest editor of my time is capable like Homer of nodding, and I wouldn't want any author in the audience here to think that I'm not very well aware of the fact that the editorial function frequently results in something a little short of perfection. So unless you are all overcome by a good side of the editorial operation, I have selected from Mr. Perkins' letters to a contemporary writer something which I regard as balderdash. And in reading it I must tell you that unfortunately, this kind of horse liniment is altogether too viable. And I myself writing similar passages have never been called once for doing this.

This is a letter by Mr. Perkins, who certainly was as good as any editor of our time, to a writer named Nancy Hale, whose work I'm sure some of you at least have read. "Dear, Nancy. You cannot worry me about your novel. I remember so well the quality of all that I saw of it and I know that you have a rich and sensitive mind and memory. In fact, I would be much more concerned if you did not have to go through periods of despair and anxiety, and dissatisfaction. It is true that a good many novelists do not but I think the best ones truly do. And I don't see how it could be otherwise. It is awfully hard work, writing of the kind you do.

I myself feel certain that it will end very well indeed if you can endure the struggle. The struggle is part of the process. There is no sign that Jane Austen had any trouble at all but I am sure Charlotte Bronte must have had, and almost all of the really good ones except Jane, who is good as gold of course."

As I say even Homer nods, and if I had received a letter like that from an editor I wouldn't have known what to do with the work in question at all except possibly to reread Jane Austen and reflect that it didn't cause her any trouble at all to write what she wrote.

LAUGHTER

Now, I'm not contending in these quotations, and in the course of this talk that I think that any editor is capable of being universally interested but only being catholically interested with a small "c." Naturally, anybody is more interested in some things than others. The better the editor, the more things he's interested in, and the more things a man is interested in the better foothold he has on the problem of becoming a good editor.

By the same token, no one editor could suffice a whole society. Mark Twain said that it was a difference of opinion that made horse races possible. And it's a difference of opinion on the part of editors that makes modern publishing possible. Otherwise, we'd have one single vertical trust the way they do in Russia. I've watched my contemporaries make a lot of money off books in which I could see but little virtue and turned down, and I have myself from time to time scored some astonishing successes off things which were rejected by better men than I.

But from the point of view of management of a publishing house the trouble with editors is twofold. The first trouble is very serious, they spend money. Publishing is not a very profitable process and editors are apt to be quite lavish with money in different ways. They have a bad habit of handing it out to authors and worse than that, they sometimes allow authors to write books in a manner which makes them more expensive to produce many other things. This makes editors unreliable from the management point of view.

Equally bad, the editors aren't infallible. In fact, very few of them bat over .300. When they do they seldom if ever get the same salary that Monte Irvin gets for doing the same thing for the New York Giants.

I'd like to leave plenty of time for questions. So I'm going to skip over the rest of my points rather rapidly. The modern book editor is required to be a creative type guy. He's supposed to have a lot of book ideas and know who could write them and go out and get them, and all the rest of it, and woe betide if it doesn't sell. Management has a memory longer than an elephant, it never forgets. And the next project he brings up has got two strikes on it.

The next place the editor is being subjected to a cruel and unusual form of punishment, if he's as old as I am, he began by planning to be a book editor and finds himself in his middle age being compelled to edit something which no longer is a book but is a property. It is we'll say 2/3 of a ghost or a novel and at this point, the writer has sold it to him and having made the book contract sale, the writer's mind immediately switches to a consideration of what he could do with it in television, radio, first serial, 101 other places all of which pay very much better than the royalty on the book itself. And all he wants from his editor is advice as to how now that I've got you nailed to the cross I can really get the big dough.

And this is becoming an increasing matter. It's not only directly with the authors themselves that this tendency is taking place but also interminable meetings, which I myself hold, and I'm sure all other editors do with the author's agents, who are no longer interested in what the Germans used to call a NON-ENGLISH the book is a book, but in the property.

And the editor is compelled to be a universal genius, he doesn't produce a good book, he produces a good property, or rather he supervises the production of a good property. And this is very attractive in the rare cases where it works out, everybody makes a lot of money off it but there still are the old fables about the two stools and you know who is between the two bundles of hay.

A book is a book, is a book, and my advice as an editor, to any writers in the audience is to write a book. And don't try to become booksellers or TV experts or scenario writers or literary agents or anything of the sort. Just write books. Leave it to the people who have to make their living in these secondary areas to exploit your property for you. If they could they'd probably write themselves. In any event, they're good at what they're good at, stick with what you're good at.

I make it sound as if it was pretty rough to be an editor. It isn't but the roughest thing of all is a hard thing to explain to all of you. And here I'm departing from my outline, it's an emotional thing. Nowadays, if you win you don't make any money off it, you don't win except prestige or acclaim, a lot of things. There's practically nothing in it for you. If you lose, boy you really lose. Those are real dollars that you lose. And there aren't very many publishers' yachts, and what yachts there are belong to people who decided to become publishers because they could afford both activities at one and the same time.

APPLAUSE

I think now we can have a--

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.