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I suppose that De Voto, Brooks and Adams will feel that this taste
for a rough and unpatriotic American realism is simply perverse. But to
most readers it will seem fair enough, especially in view of the com–
parative impotence of the European novel since the 1920's. Recent
American writing does exhibit "an atmosphere of freshness and liveliness,
a new way of knowing and feeling, a source of new propositions for an
existence," as an anonymous critic in the French magazine
Confluences
lately asserted. Yet this critic has his reservations: he says that the
Americans depict life in a way which is original but "not always authentic
or profound." And Malraux, too, in saying that "the high stakes for
which this literature will play will be to become intellectualized without
losing its direct grip," seems to be conscious of its limitations as well as
its powers.
Other French critics are not so judicious. In face of their frequent
extravagances the American novelist must sometimes feel that he is
being given a testimonial dinner under the impression that he is Cer–
vantes. The praise falls, moreover, alike on the second-rate and the
first-rate, on Steinbeck as on Faulkner. And the reasons for the vogue
are not always as pleasing to the national literary ego as they might
seem to be.
The political reasons are obvious and in the long run not very im–
portant. In an interview printed in 1940 Malraux envisaged American
literature as a vital part of an "Atlantic culture" which should embrace
the Americas and the countries of western Europe.
If
we recall Malraux's
inveterate facility at translating political necessities into humanist slo–
gans, we can see how his idea of an Atlantic culture answered to the
practical needs of an alarmingly weak and isolated France.
But there are deeper reasons for the popularity of the American
novel in France. Certain of the younger French writers are today pre–
occupied with what they regard as an irreconcilable tension between
the claims of the personal and the social; and as H. J. Kaplan said of
this movement in a recent PARTISAN REVIEW: "Any history of its origin
would be concerned with the influence of the American novel." In
other words, the American novel is esteemed in France because, as the
product of the most advanced industrial nation, it affords particularly
powerful images of the brutal milieux and lonely heroes, the alienation
and dehumanization, which are typical of the present world in general.
It is something of this sort that Jean-Francois Ricard seems to discover
in Faulkner. "Among the inhuman there will exist at least one being who
will be human: oneself. And then, in the same world, at the some
moment, this no longer results in chance, it results in fatality. Pure
fatality, the only palpable kind, not external, nor social, because when
one is confronted by society one can elude it or accept it or humble
oneself before it. But although Faulkner's heroes would like to accept
