PARIS LETTER
367
I suspect, at least indirectly, of American pragmatism. This despite the
fact that these people have obviously read much Heidegger and Kierke–
gaard, and little if any John Dewey. (In last week's
Gavroche,
Etienne
Lalou makes an astonishing
Defense du Roman
fran~ais;
he denounces
the influence of the American novel which, unlike Huxley or Woolf or
Dostoevsky, is
impt!rialistic,
i.e., tends to install its psychology and its
character on French soil. Let the American bring to the bar of World
Literature their conception of man, he says, but we too have a contribu–
tion to make in this respect!)
Le M ur,
which circulated a good deal in
New York, a few years ago, as well as
La Nausee,
Sartre's remarkable
novel, show not precisely the influence of Hemingway and Faulkner
respectively, but rather a profound preoccupation with certain esthetic
and moral problems implicit in the work of the Americans. I mean pro–
blems of which Hemingway and Faulkner are quite unaware. Camus'
L'Etranger,
which is a "younger" book and reveals influences more
readily, demonstrates the same point: the young French writers who have
been reading with such intense admiration the works of Hemingway,
Faulkner, Caldwell, Dos Passos and, more recently, Steinbeck and Saro–
yan, have transformed the style and onset of these writers into explicit
ideas; these in turn have been transposed into images which (in the
measure of the skill and passion of the writer) have had significant re–
ference to contemporary French experience. They have intellectualized,
for example, the loneliness of the American hero, the brutality or cold
hostility of his world. And this is in accordance with a training and a
tradition wherein the "cult of experience" does not exclude the experi–
ence of ideas.
H.
J.
KAPLAN
