Annotations for Speaker: W.m. Frohock

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under moral, would you include aesthetic?

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

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

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

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

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

INAUDIBLE

Now, I find that awfully difficult to follow--

Can I ask--

How would you like to be in my place?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--is involved with this one.

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

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

And not hallucinated?

No, I wasn't.

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

Can I answer?

No.

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

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

Well, I did mean that.

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

Well, how did I ever get there?

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

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

I don't want to do it.

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

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

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

Well, once again, why do I sit down?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American says the problem of the novel is American man. Oh, let's put that right. The American says, the problem of the American novel is man in America. The European says, the problem of the novel, the subject of the novel, is man, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. I think that in that slight difference in words is the essential difference between the European and the American. And I don't think that, in spite of all that, the difference is terribly great.

Sorry.

Sorry.

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

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

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

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