ACADEMICIAN'S CHAPBOOK
such books out year after year, one forming a footnote in the next,
and that graduate students will cleave their way through these prose
jungles to find a reference for a thesis that no one will read.
J. B.
FRENCH PERIODICALS
Simone de Beauvoir publishes the first installment of her
diary on her last year's trip to America in the December, 1947 issue of
Les Temps Modernes.
Madame de Beauvoir still likes Steinbeck, James Cain, and Erskine
Caldwell. She is not well-disposed toward
PARTISAN REVIEW:
it is not
open
to
the realistic currents of American life, and it is snobbish.
What strikes her in America is "the divorce between intellectuals
and creative writers; most creative writers started out by selling news–
papers or shining shoes and acquired their culture through the hazards
of life; inversely, it is very rare that men of culture produce creative
writing; so that this quarrel is almost a class quarrel. In France we
have an overproduction of intellectuals; for us the effort of writers to
integrate the crudest forms of life into literature was new and has
enriched us particularly."
Some of Madame de Beauvoir's observations on the role of psy–
chology and especially of psychoanalysis in America seem relevant:
If
psychoanalysis is so fashionable in the U.S., it is not because Americans
expect this discipline to help them to "find themselves," but on the
contrary because they expect from it complicity with their own escapism.
The unadjusted may be tempted to question the order of the world in
which he lives; such a revolutionary attitude is dangerous and threaten–
ing for society, and in tum creates anxieties in the individual who has
to face decisions, risks, responsibilities. Hence, the individual admits
a priori that he who is maladjusted is wrong, and he is only too happy
to consider his confusion a sickness which can be cured as easily as
a cold. All the questions which worry him, all his doubts and anxieties
are not recognized as expressions of an inner truth; they are considered
to
be
objective realities which must be studied scientifically ... Every
individual is a "case." An individual who departs from the norm because
of his extravagance, eccentricity, the affirmation of his individuality,
is called "a character." A "case" is described by his "problem." Every
American citizen has a "problem" just as he has a marital status; if he
is normal and perspicacious, he himself knows how to define it in terms
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