|
August 3, Evening Part Two
|
58:27
|
I don't have much to say to Mr. West's points, IN that I think he summarized and commented on what I had to say fairly, with perhaps one small reservation-- that his feeling that I had somehow underrated EM Forster by saying that his work dealt with the vocabulary of bad taste rather than the vocabulary of sin, in writers like Graham Greene, I think is unwarranted.
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 3, Evening Part Two
|
59:00
|
I was suggesting, and would argue, I think, that these are both major traditions in the serious and worthwhile novel. And if Graham Greene, and those like him, sees things in terms of sin, and Forster does not, I surely wouldn't submit that as a weakness in Forster. I would also note in that account that when I said that Foster's picture of the human heart was no darker than a well-kept front parlor, that of course, a well-kept front parlor is very dark.
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 3, Evening Part Two
|
59:50
|
Other than that, I suppose the big issue is Kafka, which I think is too much to bring up as a discussion now. And all you can fairly say is that Mr. West apparently doesn't share my feelings for Kafka. I refuse to give them up for that reason, and will, left with what I imagine all of you are exercised with, too, which is simply a difference in taste and opinion. And that's all.
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 4, Afternoon Part Three
|
1:01
|
This seems to be the carom question.
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 4, Afternoon Part Three
|
1:07
|
Mr. West reproved me a little for the term pseudo fiction last night. And then, he suggested that many traditional fictions would probably be called pseduo fiction. I think as I was using it in a limited sense, it means a bad book. That is, it means a book that doesn't come alive, that hasn't grown--
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 4, Afternoon Part Three
|
1:27
|
--that hasn't shaped its experience into any kind of effective, any kind of imagined-- the thing I hate to keep harping on those words. But I don't seem to have any others. About Sinclair Lewis, the truth of the matter is, I suppose, I'm a little of both parties in that I've never read much of him. And I probably wouldn't and would find him dull. But that I would agree that our criticism, every variety of it has its fashionable writers.
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 4, Afternoon Part Three
|
1:56
|
And even if he were better, he would just not be one of its fashionable writers at the moment. That is, criticism carries along with it, as Mr. Frohock said, a certain number of writers who do what it thinks should be done. And I suspect that all of those criticisms are reductive, that all of our criticism-- certainly much of what we heard last night-- seemed to be saying that one kind of novel was it. And you can more or less throw the others out.
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 4, Afternoon Part Three
|
2:26
|
That is we have an alarming tendency to prescribe for the novel rather than to report what it's doing. And I suspect that probably the silliest of all critical positions is that connote position of telling the writer to go and do something else. I suspect that Mr. O'Connor, who is in the curiously ambiguous position of being both critic and novelist, can carry that off better than most of us.
|
Stanley Hyman |
|
August 4, Afternoon Part Three
|
2:51
|
And I think he played a little fast and loose with us last night in telling a great body of novel to go die, while at the same time saying that much of it he rather liked and would perhaps admit that some of his own work is actually part of that fine modern literature he was excommunicating for us. But I don't think that Sinclair Lewis in any fashion is much of a problem-- that is, he isn't much read. He's probably not the novel of the future more than Henry James. And specifically, I have nothing at all to say about him.
|
Stanley Hyman |