The second evening of talks and discussion on August 4th continues from Part Two with the continuation of the second part of W.M. Frohock’s response to George Simenon’s talk “The Era of the Novel?” and Ralph Ellison’s talk “Certain Neglected Aspects of the American Novel.” On the next recording, the conference continues on August 5th.
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| 12:41 | Only that I would return again to the specific novel as found in France as against I'd found the United States. And I will have to paraphrase Mr. André Malraux when he says that there's little to discover about the nature of French society. It's well documented from Balzac on, so much so that Malraux could turn his attention to the more abstract predicament of man. | Ralph Ellison |
| 13:19 | But he didn't just write about man in the abstract. The condition-- I mean man's fate is about and is well documented by his depiction of Shanghai and of revolutionary action. And in fact, someone has pointed out that Malraux is such a good writer that one doesn't feel that this is China seen through the eyes of a European, but that it is China. | Ralph Ellison |
| 13:59 | However, I do agree with Mr. Frohock that the problem of man is at another level, an abstraction the same. But then, that gives me real hope, because I can write about the predicament of negro characters in the south, let us say, and still speak, if I do it well enough, to those people who are looking at the condition of man, the predicament of man, in its most abstract sense. | Ralph Ellison |
| 18:32 | Yes, I do. | Ralph Ellison |
| 18:39 | It's all very well to engage in wit. But the novel, Mr. O'Connor, is a very serious concern. I must be specifically, because I feel that that the role is a dedicated one, perhaps because I come to it from a background of music and whatnot, and which all of this was something new to discover. | Ralph Ellison |
| 19:25 | But I know without having so many great writers behind me-- that is, writers handling the same reality, using the same folklore, in fact, telling some of the same stories, having developed a theme-- that it's quite difficult to seize a part of reality, yes, an American reality, specifically American reality. I don't think it has its value because it's American. And I'm not selling any brand of nationalism. | Ralph Ellison |
| 20:08 | But it just happens to be a fact. This is the way men live now at this particular time under these particular circumstances. You cannot get away from it. The novel is not an abstract instrument. I will say this, that I believe that in a sense, human life during this particular historical period is of a hope. Otherwise, comparative literature would make no sense, and we'd all be talking in vacuums. But I was very glad that Mr. Frohock pointed out that I owe a great deal to André Malraux. | Ralph Ellison |
| 20:49 | There is this also to be said, that Malraux's great novels, at least a part of his great novels, turn to mock him now, because he was seeking for that abstract political reality, which was not based upon the customs of a specific people. I don't see how you can get away from it. It's not out of a desire to know-- I mean to sell a phony conception of nationalism. I reject that. I've suffered from it. | Ralph Ellison |
| 21:29 | But I don't think you can know other people until you know yourself. I don't think that we can understand other peoples until we understand ourselves. I don't think we would send Jimmy Burns to enter the UN if we understood ourselves, because certainly, he won't understand other people. | Ralph Ellison |
| 21:55 | So this is, after all, very serious. And if we're going to discuss ideas, let's discuss ideas. Are we going to crack jokes? I know a few good ones. | Ralph Ellison |
| 22:23 | Well, you dance to yours. I'll have to dance to mine. | Ralph Ellison |
| 27:17 | Well, some novels aren't being read. Let us put it that way. Most new novels aren't being read. The great successes, I think, are novels which have been made available through the paperback editions. I think that there has been a falling off in the interest in the novel. And it is true. | Ralph Ellison |
| 27:45 | I think Mr. Sloan could probably substantiate this, that there has been a greater interest in non-fiction recently in terms of new books. Maybe it's because of the crisis, a sense of crisis, which we have now. And perhaps it's because some of the sense of-- the romantic sense of the possibility has gone out of the novels written by most of us younger writers who have just come out of the war and who don't feel too optimistic about things. | Ralph Ellison |
| 28:23 | But I think it's the nature of man to-- and here, I guess I'm using "man" in that capitalized sense, international and everything. It's his nature to refuse to die. He cannot live with the absurd. He cannot live with chaos. And he, while he might not come to the novel expecting to be shown a pretty picture, he does expect from it that sense of triumph, that sense of struggling and to dominate reality, which can make a tragedy, a tragic action, a very exhilarating experience, simply because by reducing this chaos to an artistic form, we are justified. We are saved somehow. | Ralph Ellison |
| 0:57 | Applause | Audience |
| 12:10 | Applause | Audience |
| 16:08 | Applause | Audience |
| 17:22 | Applause | Audience |
| 18:25 | Applause | Audience |
| 18:36 | Applause | Audience |
| 21:51 | Applause | Audience |
| 22:04 | Laughter and applause | Audience |
| 22:50 | I have been interested in the fact that so much emphasis has been laid upon the novel as a means of exploration of man, as giving us the knowledge of man. Now, if one followed the argument of monsieur Simenon, for instance, could we ask the question, what will happen to the novel if its essence is the knowledge of man when psychology, and history, and sociology become popularized? Is there not some danger in placing the essence of the novel in the knowledge of man? And what do you mean by knowledge in that sense? | Audience |
| 24:57 | Applause | Audience |
| 25:49 | Applause | Audience |
| 26:01 | I'd like to ask Mr. West and Mr. Ellison why they think the novel isn't being sold and read today and whether it is because the novels are so sad, or because the novels are so sad, because people aren't buying them anymore. | Audience |
| 29:40 | Applause | Audience |
| 0:06 | We're going to have a brief commentary on these two papers, and then there will be questions and discussion, part of the people on the stage and questions from the audience following that. | Carvel Collins |
| 0:21 | The commentator this evening who will speak for 10, or 12, or 15 minutes on these two papers is Professor Frohock, who has for a long time been professor at Columbia University. And he is now, as of this fall, chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Wesleyan college. He is an authority on contemporary fiction. He's published a book on some aspects of contemporary American novels. And he has published a book on Malraux. Professor Frohock. | Carvel Collins |
| 12:23 | Are there any comments from the members of the panel up here? Anyone who has anything to say objecting to or supporting anything that's been said? Mr. Ellison, would you have anything to say to Mr. Frohock's comments? | Carvel Collins |
| 14:34 | Thank you. Mr. Simenon, would you-- | Carvel Collins |
| 14:38 | Would you pull that towards you? | Carvel Collins |
| 15:21 | Mr. Hyman, would you speak to this human condition? | Carvel Collins |
| 15:42 | Mr. O'Connor? | Carvel Collins |
| 17:20 | Mr. West? | Carvel Collins |
| 18:28 | I don't know, but I'll say Does anyone up on the stage want to speak about this? | Carvel Collins |
| 22:16 | Mr. O'Connor? | Carvel Collins |
| 22:28 | Mr. West, would you-- all right. Fine. Are there any questions from the audience to be addressed to the speakers or anyone on the panel? If you'll raise your hands rather higher than last evening, it's easier for the men with the microphones to see them. Please, would you wait until-- speak into the microphone. | Carvel Collins |
| 25:54 | Is there a question over in this part of the audience? Here is one up forward. | Carvel Collins |
| 27:12 | Mr. Ellison, this question was also addressed to you. | Carvel Collins |
| 29:20 | Thank you, Mr. Ellison. This subject of publication and who's reading novels and who isn't is in great part the subject of tomorrow evening. And I want now to resist the temptation to ask Mr. Sloan to speak of it now, and we'll call this a fortunate transition to tomorrow's evening and adjourn at this point. | Carvel Collins |
| 12:17 | Commenting on the addresses by Georges Simenon and Ralph Ellison, Professor Wilbur M. Frohock of Columbia University. | WGBH Radio Announcement |
| 1:03 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 1:54 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 2:40 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 3:25 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 4:16 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 4:58 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 5:31 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 6:27 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 7:20 | 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] | W.M. Frohock |
| 7:44 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 8:29 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 9:00 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 9:29 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 10:03 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 10:39 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 11:26 | 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. | W.M. Frohock |
| 15:27 | Well, I'd sooner hear Mr. O'Connor on this since the novel, the 20th century novel, he buried last night seems to have revived this evening. | Stanley Hyman |
| 17:29 | That makes it very difficult, indeed, to go on being serious. But the only thing which I must say really appalls me very much indeed in this discussion is the phrase an American reality. To think that after a century of the horrors of nationalism, we should start pegging out national areas of reality is so appalling that I can hardly bear to think of it. | Anthony West |
| 17:54 | It does seem the ultimate in the decay of the idea of Christendom, which has taken place in the last 1,000 years that you could come even to be provincial in your conceptions of reality. I had hoped that we had gone forward to that from that, that we were only concerned with the reality of human beings with which human beings have to deal, that we had gone away from those small, small conceptions of local pictures. All right. | Anthony West |
| 26:30 | I don't remember ever having said that people weren't buying novels or reading them. That must be somebody else, I think. They are, so far as bulk is concerned, reading, I think, more than they ever did before. There's a literate public which never existed before, which I don't think has much use for novels, which has a great bulk of literature supplied to it, which is rather overwhelming in comparison to the novel and makes it look as if the novel was less being sold and read less than it was. But I don't-- I think that's an optical illusion and not one which statistics support. | Anthony West |
| 12:23 - 29:40 | August 4 Panel Discussion | Program |
| 14:36 | Just INAUDIBLE | George Simenon |
| 14:41 | --is to explain, when I said behind 99% of the novelist hides a bashful essayist or poet, the term poet here is in the pejorative sense. As we employ it very often in France, we mean poet not as Hemingway, or Steinbeck, or Faulkner, but, for example, as T | George Simenon |
| 23:30 | Yes. I think I understand. I am not absolutely sure. But what I mean is that it's not the business of the novelist to discuss conscientiously sociology, or psychology, or any techniques we may discuss anywhere. He has to put as much humanity in his work. And if it's sociology or psychology in it, it must be unconscious. You understand what I mean? | George Simenon |
| 23:59 | If you start a novel with the idea of exposing some theory, some theories, you will write a wrong novel, absolutely a bad, bad novel. But if you start with just man, and you follow man, you will have a novel. And maybe it will be psychology in it, and even philosophy, and everything. But you don't have to expose it. Do you know what I mean? It's something absolutely different. | George Simenon |
| 24:27 | It's like Mr. INAUDIBLE who was making prose without knowing it. Everybody makes prose every day. And everybody makes psychology every day, but not the same way that Mr. INAUDIBLE, for example, will start a novel with a trained thought. Today, I will treat the man who did a bad confession to his priest, and then he proved some theory. He proved nothing, and he did always a bad novel. That's what I try to explain. | George Simenon |
| 25:01 | And-- I'm sorry. And it gave me the occasion to answer at the same time at Mr. O'Connor, because when he asked to have moral or something of this kind in a novel, it's exactly the same thing. We have a proverb in France who said that you can't do art with good intentions. It's impossible. | George Simenon |
| 25:24 | Moral may come later, or it may be moral in your work, but you don't start to moralize the people who start to be-- to do a novel there. Michelangelo did not his 16 by religion but to make a novel there. And it was the same for every painter and every artist, moral that's come later. It comes maybe in your work, but not voluntarily. That's the question. | George Simenon |
| 15:44 | I'm afraid I've got very little to say, ladies and gentlemen, except that in case that in the portion of the audience which remains, there is a young writer who wants to write novels or short stories. Do let me explain to him that it's not as serious as all that. | Frank O'Connor |
| 16:12 | When I hear all these ponderous words pouring forth-- and I know they mean so much and all the rest of it-- I think of the village idiot in an Irish village who was seen after he had left school, hurling his three schoolbooks into the stream. With the first one he said, whereas. And then, he said, in as much. And then, he hurled the third book in and said, in so far. | Frank O'Connor |
| 16:46 | Well, I had a feeling, listening to these two masters of literature, Mr. Simenon, Mr. Ellison, tonight, that I was listening to the story of INAUDIBLE, who was suffering in the interests of the community. And again, I felt all the time like that man that Boswell describes, who said to Dr. Johnson that he himself was very interested in philosophy at one time. But cheerfulness would keep breaking through. | Frank O'Connor |
| 22:16 | I think-- | Frank O'Connor |
| 22:17 | INAUDIBLE to Mr. Ellison is, why should the devil have all the tunes? | Frank O'Connor |