158
PARTISAN REVIEW
Do you not believe that English sensibility is closer today to French
sensibility than to American?
I do. We were shown
this
rather strikingly by the War. But
what does England bring to us in art? English art, like London taxis,
all looks alike. D. H. Lawrence, except for his puritanism, could pass
for a French novelist, and almost of the nineteenth century. You un–
derstand that I am not talking about
influence,
but of convergence:
what I mean is that what Hemingway, Caldwell and Steinbeck are
looking for
is closer to what the French writers of 1940 were looking
for, before they had read them, than to a single British novelist. And
this
obsession with the "fundamental" man which is the mark of
contemporary American literature has no doubt been strengthened by
the War-unless the opposite reaction proves so violent that a litera–
ture of delicacy and imagination makes its appearance. But I believe
that we may expect both.
Isn't there something primitive in the particular character of Ameri–
can literature to which you refer?
It might seem that way, but I don't think so. Many cultured
Americans consider their present-day literature decadent. To them,
the great period of American literature
is
the nineteenth century, the
period of Poe, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman. Heming–
way has something in common with the primitives, but he is not a
follower of theirs. But it is not so much that: as I see it, the essential
characteristic of present-day American literature is that it
is
the only
literature which is not the work of intellectuals. I am neither approv–
ing nor disapproving; I am stating a fact. (It is my conviction that
the great effort of this literature
is
going to be its attempt to intel–
lectualize itself without losing its direct contact.) The writers I met
iri
the United States reminded me very little of the European writer.
They have neither his relative historical culture nor his fondness for
ideas (which in the United States
is
the prerogative of the professor).
Rather they made me
think
of our painters: they have the same in–
difference toward nearly everything except food and drink, the same
precise and certain knowledge of the technique of their fellow artists
both past and present, the same love of change, the same picturesque
manner of dress, and even sometimes the same physical appear–
ance. . . •
