16
PARTISAN REVIEW
friends are an abyss of agreement apart and shook his head gloomily
from time to time as if it were all too possible that what I had to say
might even be true.
Still he always recovered the private heat of that private and
indispensable arrogance which had enabled him to drill the wire into
the rock. No , he would always finish by saying , it was a modest book ,
and doubtless had its serious flaws ;
quandmeme,
it had its irreducible
little value-he thought finally there was something to it . That was to
prove a small consolation in the face of his ongoing poverty , and the
modest reception when it came out , its even more modest sale , hard–
cover for a couple of thousand and no paperback , its quick disappear–
ance. Even in France where reviews were good , the book did little .
None of that could have offered him much , and in fact he has not
published another novel over all these twenty years- perhaps we keep
writing fiction until the pressure of everything in the scheme of things
which does not desire novels squeezes us back.
It
could be said that
civilization will enter hell when ,no more good novels are written and
the hum of the TV set is the only resonance in our ear-certain
enough , at any rate , a novelist feels that void of substance in his soul
(which saints refer to as hell) about the time all urge to write a novel has
deserted him . Just as it is the human fate to die , so it may be the
novelist 's fate to stop writing novels-it comes finally out of the
baggage of disappointment in one 's life , a species of cumulative
nothingness, and Malaquais' fictional talents have indeed been
silent~
Still , it was also part of his character, part of the dignity of a
master , that my intense dislike of
TheJoker
never affected our friend–
ship , in fact may have improved it , for in coming to revere him less and
comprehend him a little more, I came also to understand that he was
made of the noble material from which the best friendships are
formed.
For he was utterly without rancor at my dislike of his work , and it
was a soup of good marrow for any good friendship to know that the
intensity of the critical standards he imposed on others was applicable
to himself. Literary criticism had to exist for itself. That is what this
6 He has published a book,
Kierkegaard: Faith and Paradox
which must surely be one of the most extra–
ordinary studies ever done on the Dane . UnfortunatcJy
it
has not been translated from French to English.
