184
PARTISAN REVIEW
Audience: Just a comment. There was a show on Mary Cassatt's mate–
rial. And I don't know if it's in the archives or not, but they have a very
funny letter
to
her parents. They had visited her in Paris and she had
taken them
to
one of her studios where they bought a couple of Mon–
ets. And in the letter she underlined, "Hang on
to
your Monets."
Annie Cohen-Solal: In a speech Sartre made at Yale University in
'946,
he mentioned how, in literature, cultures borrow from each other. He
said, "The occupation heightened French intellectuals' fascination with
American life, its vio lence, its excess, its mobility. The principal reason
of the influence of the American novel comes from the revolution it
brought
to
narrative techniques"-here, he is referring primarily
to
Dos
Passos. He continues, "We did not seek tales of murder and rape out of
moral delight, but for lessons in renewing the art of writing. Without
being aware of it, we were crushed by the weight of our traditions and
culture. And American novelists, without tradition and without assis–
tance, forged ahead with barbaric brutality, which was an instrument of
inestimable value. We have made us of this conscious and intellectual
manner, which was the fruit of talent and of unconscious spontaneity.
The first French novels written after the occupation will soon appear in
the United States. We are going
to
reestablish the techniques that you
lent
to
us. We will return them digested, intellectualized, less effective
and less forceful, consciously adapted
to
french tastes. Due
to
this
incessant exchange that leads nations to rediscover in others that which
they invented and then rejected, you may we ll discover in these foreign
books the eterna l youth of the 'old' Faulkner." This has
to
do with lit–
erature, but 1 think it's exactly what it is about in art as well. Sartre had
written a wonderful piece on Dos Passos, about whom he gave his first
speech as professor of philosophy, in
' 930 .
Simone de Beauvoir had
translated
Manhattan Transfer
for him-which I found out when she
gave me that speech. They had really promoted each other.
Jules Olitski: They preferred Faulkner before we did. faulkner was much
more famous in Paris in
1949
than here. France got its culture from Italy
when the king, Fran<;:ois I, invited the architect who built city hall.
Annie Cohen-Solal: Yes, Pietro di Cortona. He was born in my village
in Italy, Cortona.
Audience: It's a pattern. The Romans got their culture from the Greeks
and the Greeks got a lot of theirs from Egypt.
