LETTERS FROM PARIS
453
the end of Bernanos' earlier book,
Un crime,
but he chopped this section
out and wrote a new one for
Un crime
because he had agreed to write
a detective story and the editor became worried when Bernanos really got
interested in his characters. His letters indicated that he then started
to write a new novel based upon this fragment, and at the end of 1935 he
remarked that
Un mauvais reve
was practically finished. As it stands,
though, the book is jerky and disjointed, obviously not a completed work;
nor does Beguin explain satisfactorily why Bemanos, who was always
short of cash, didn't publish the book if he had a completed manu–
script in 1935. But if the book doesn't hang together, it's nonetheless a
series of extraordinary portraits-an emotionally exhausted writer, once
endowed with a Balzacian vitality, driving himself to keep overproduc–
ing and drawing inspiration from the poisoned imagination of his
secretary; the secretary herself, drug addict, pathological liar and even–
tually murderess, but obsessed with a need to tum her dreams--her
bad dreams,
mauvais reves-into
terrible reality; two foppish young
French intellectuals, one of whom commits suicide after flirting with
the Commies and anarchists. Particularly the second part of the book,
recounting the murder of an old lady by the secretary (this was the
section that the editor felt didn't fit the detective story because "the
tone changed") has an hallucinatory quality almost worthy of Dostoev–
sky.
The vogue of Existentialism in France has had many incalculable
effects, ranging from a Hegel Renaissance at the Sorbonne to the cellar
night clubs
(cav eaus)
clustered in the St. Germain des Pres area, where
the joint is always jumping with American
jazz~r
its sometimes not–
too-recognizable facsimile. Besides all this, Existentialism has also pro–
duced what French critics dramatically call
une crise du roman.
J ean–
Paul Sartre discovered one day that everybody was
en situation
and
couldn't get out of his or her own point of view; this led Sartre, as
far back as 1938, to call Dos Passos the greatest living writer because
Dos Passos' technique was a novelistic counterpart of Existentialist
metaphysics; and since that time the younger French critics have been
worrying about the defects of their own novels, where an omniscient
observer too often reflects a fixed framework of values that nobody
believes in any more. This is one reason for the vogue in France of
Ie
roman americain,
and it's the one that may tum out to have most value
in
the future; for it has set the new generation of French critics to
thinking about the problems of the novel in a philosophical perspective.
One of the most gifted of these critics is Claude-Edmonde Magny, who
has just brought out the first volume of a
Histoire du roman franfais
