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August 4, Evening Part Three
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0:57
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Applause
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Audience |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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12:10
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Applause
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Audience |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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0:06
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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.
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Carvel Collins |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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0:21
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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.
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Carvel Collins |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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1:03
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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1:54
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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2:40
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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3:25
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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4:16
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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4:58
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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5:31
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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6:27
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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7:20
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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]
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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7:44
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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8:29
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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9:00
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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9:29
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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10:03
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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10:39
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |
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August 4, Evening Part Three
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11:26
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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.
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W.M. Frohock |