Annotations for "George Simenon"

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August 4, Evening Part One	11:07	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	11:24	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	11:47	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	12:28	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	12:58	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 error 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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	13:45	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	14:34	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	15:07	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	15:47	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	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	16:33	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 college girl should confide, with a sigh, what a novel my life would make if I should only write it.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	17:01	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	17:44	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	18:12	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	18:53	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	19:37	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	20:08	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	20:52	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	21:09	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	21:50	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	22:26	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	22:53	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	23:29	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	24:01	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	24:19	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	25:24	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	25:53	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	26:41	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	27:14	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	27:38	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."	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	27:59	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."	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	28:40	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	29:11	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	29:35	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	30:23	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	30:52	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	31:27	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	32:01	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	32:50	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	33:23	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	33:55	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	34:36	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	35:08	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	35:42	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."	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	36:19	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	36:46	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	37:24	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	38:14	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	38:50	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	39:38	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	40:13	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	40:47	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	41:14	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	41:38	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	42:18	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	43:16	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	44:06	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	44:52	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	45:35	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	45:56	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	46:41	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	47:15	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	47:53	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	48:38	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	49:12	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?	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	49:56	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	50:37	The novel, be it called the novel of today or of tomorrow, is still feeling its way. Manyfold, 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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	51:04	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	51:28	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	51:54	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part One	52:20	The second form, harsher and quicker, gets hold of a person at a turning point--	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part Two	0:02	Giving birth along the way to the man of tomorrow was story for 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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part Two	0:36	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part Two	1:02	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part Two	1:39	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part Two	2:03	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.	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part Three	14:36	Just INAUDIBLE	George Simenon
August 4, Evening Part Three	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
August 4, Evening Part Three	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
August 4, Evening Part Three	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
August 4, Evening Part Three	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
August 4, Evening Part Three	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
August 4, Evening Part Three	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
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:38	INAUDIBLE	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:31	INAUDIBLE. It's very short.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:34	I think that the conclusion may be that it's no American novel, nor the the French novel or German novels, nor 18th century, 19th century novels. But maybe it's two kind of novels-- only the good and the bad. I think that is the only conclusion after all the discussion.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	6:15	INAUDIBLE , We have a few comic novels, and in literature there are very, very few. And I think that the comic-- the bed is of comic is cruelty. And we are no more cruel in everything. We see the man who has too much sympathy-- too much sympathy? No, it's not the word.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	6:34	Yes, compassion to be comics-- to be still comics. The comics is always bad. It's done something cruel. Look, remember Charlie Chaplin? Why do you love Charlie Chaplin? Because before-- because each time he tried to do something, he do it the wrong way. It's the basis of every comic. After all INAUDIBLE you already saying.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:02	Certainly liberties INAUDIBLE --	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:04	--awfully cruel, or is it? Certainly he looked the man with a very, very cruel eye.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:15	Yeah, INAUDIBLE.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:24	Yes, certainly.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:27	Yes. But look how many--	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:32	I am looking at how many comics out there we had in three centuries. There are very, very few. Less than-- and it's the same on the screen, it's the same for the stage. We have very, very few good comics. I think it's not difficult and it needs very little compassion from man. That's what I say.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:17	INAUDIBLE and it's very tangbile and it's only one novel.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	2:47	Because a lot of novels were not read for years and years, and then they are now-- now by everybody. The point of view of the publisher is the immediate point of view. He looks at the people who will read a novel the next week or the next three months. But maybe a novel that will have five readers in the next three months will be a very large, well-known novel INAUDIBLE years later.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	3:12	In the case of Flaubert that we spoke yesterday-- at the time of Flaubert he would certainly not have the publish problem because at this time nobody thinks that people will read it. Madame Bovary looked like something very boring for the people at this time, and now everybody knows it. So it's very naive, this point of view, because the man who will today throw the book is maybe the same one who in 20 years will read avidly-- avidly this book when scholars would explain to him what is in it. You know what I mean?	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	3:45	INAUDIBLE that Mr. Sloanee was really trying to justify the publication of a novel at that point I think. The publishing of it, not the reading or the writing of it.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	29:40	I think have nothing very interesting to say. Maybe about the publishing business, may just I have a remark. I don't think that the danger about publishing will come from the $0.25 edition on the contrary.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	29:59	But maybe Mr. O'Connor was right in telling that the question of money necessary to publish a book now is a danger. And the danger come that the publisher, for first thought, is reason to I give the artist my money.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	30:24	And for another reason was I think the length of a room and bookshops and everywhere, try to have books where sell in a very, very short time. A book now has to be selling three months or six months or eight months, try to have a book published one year before you can find it only in $0.25 edition. A $0.25 edition keep the books.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	30:53	So the publisher first try to find what they call a bestseller. It's not necessarily a good book. It's a book with an interest to people at such time for such or such reason. So he don't try anymore to find author who will live for 30 years or 40 years in the public mind but an author who will give a fast money and as soon as possible.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	31:20	For example, Conrad is considering the publishing business as a very bad author because Conrad still sell but still a few books every year. So it interest nobody to have covered in their house, you know what I mean? And then the publishers turned to get their money back through another way. They don't speak anymore about books about novels like novels.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	31:50	But as Mr. Sloane say, it's as a piece of property. And as soon as they have the book and the contract is signed, they trying to sell no books, 3,000, 4,000. They're interested in books. But they're more interested in rights. They're selling rights, the radio rights, television rights, movies rights, and everything.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	32:15	A first serial, second serial, if there's the average selling of a book said Mr. Sloane it's about 6,000. That cost no too much money because they didn't involve too much publicity, too much work. But to go from 6,000 to 20,000, it involves a big risk because you have at this time to do a publicity and to take a risk.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	32:46	It's more interesting to sell just 3,000, even 1,000, even one book. But to sell in Hollywood the rights for $50,000 and to keep the half and sometimes more, and it's more interesting to sell it in the television of the same condition too. You know? And it's why the contract now, the printed contract and most of the publishing house speak very, very little about books but a lot about rights and about television, about everything with no books. That's the question. Why, I don't know.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	40:23	Please, just INAUDIBLE first, I will say that I am against prize for any kind of art because I don't think that the artist has to be encouraged. If he is an artist, if he has to do something, he will do it against everything and against everybody. If he is not, you may give all the prize in the world. It will never be won. And it will tie. It will be an amateur. It will be a hard thing.	George Simenon
August 5, Evening Part Two	40:53	So I am absolutely against it. Now about the influence, you have this, I think, that the literary prize in France are more like here some books of the month. They are not read by the public. They are about to be in the good place and living room so people know that you are a literary people.	George Simenon