I also finally get back to writing my own fiction, which, as always, feels really good.
2009, FROM ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE
WHAT PLAYS IN FRANCE:
OBSERVATIONS ON AMERICAN
WRITING ANOINTED IN
THE REPUBLIC
It may be a daydream—and one of sweet revenge, to boot— of many an American writer.
You know, the party who finds his or her new novel hardly reviewed before there comes the heart dropping clean to the walking shoes. In other words, innocently strolling into a big-city bookstore one Saturday afternoon, let’s say, there’s the spotting of the first three-buck remainders, which pronounces a book quite dead before even being given a fair chance at slow and honorable extinction by simply going out of print after a couple of years or so. Yes, a daydream for that writer to envision a work, and all of that writer’s, well, oeuvre, being (this will show ’em!) discovered and fully honored in France someday.
I mean, the French have never really been able to shake a reputation with us as a builder of lousy automobiles, after an attempt in the fifties to challenge sales of the Volkswagen Beetle in the U.S. with a notoriously unreliable little lump of a contraption called the Renault Dauphine (I had an older cousin who loved to tell how the shift lever on his just snapped off in his hand like a big pretzel stick). And more awkward to discuss—and having degenerated to fodder for very tired jokes, further worn out in the course of recent rocky international affairs—some will say the French didn’t have the luck to offer the image of great modern warriors, considering their track record of being invaded in the late nineteenth century and right into the twentieth (I still see old black-and-white photos of those immaculate, seemingly futuristic underground control rooms of the Maginot Line and wonder why anybody couldn’t foresee any everyday army, let alone the crack German squadrons, simply going around that reportedly impenetrable defense). Nevertheless, and despite all that, the French always have enjoyed a revered place when it involves things cultural, as most everybody agrees.
Concerning literature from America, they are known for showing a rare eye in recognizing the significant stuff, and, hell, are they ever sometimes right.
Some years ago, when I was fortunate enough to go on the first of what have been my three teaching exchanges at French universities, I was assigned a course that, much to my delight, included on the reading list William Goyen’s little masterpiece The House of Breath.
The prof in charge of the course assured me Goyen was very respected in France. The House of Breath (1950) is a daring novel that on one level touchingly treats everyday life in a small town in the pine woods of East Texas on the brink of the oil boom early in the twentieth century; on another level it’s a lyrical, validly visionary book-length prose poem rife with disembodied voices, fantastic plot happenings, and all the other trappings of not just what gets lumped into that easy category of Southern Gothic but what surely qualifies as bona fide magical realism—well before anybody even seemed to regularly use the term. The last time I tried to order the book for a literature seminar I was giving to my graduate creative writing students on the idea of tour de force narrative at the University of Texas (in Goyen’s own beloved home state, and where said university turned him down for an endowed position in creative writing several years before he died in 1983, I might add), I was surprised to see that it wasn’t in the prestigious Vintage paper series at Random House, the major publisher that had once released a hardbound reissue of it, but was at the time printed only as a modest offering by a small press, brave little Persea Books. A more painful experience was my going on to read some of Goyen’s letters, which were eventually published by U. of Texas Press; I learned how later in life he was having trouble getting any large American publisher to take him on, even while he was being written about extensively in France, and also Germany. He corresponded almost pleadingly with a junior editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston who was fighting in-house for publication of a new novel Goyen had just finished and already revised substantially at the request of this young editor, but—how many times have you heard this one?—somebody higher up on the wobbly editorial stepladder eventually intervened, having worked up a cost sheet and calculated projected sales, bluntly concluding no substantial money was to be made on a guy like Goyen no matter how artistically remarkable the work was, as Goyen apparently was told. So maybe the French were keeping Goyen’s work alive.
Also, remember how it was the French who probably taught us what is best in Poe and gave him international acclaim, originally through the near-obsessive desire of Charles Baudelaire to translate the bulk of his work, not long after a time when for many Americans the sickly, impoverished Poe was last heard of, if heard of at all, in a Baltimore gutter, unceremoniously dying in that city and buried in an unmarked grave. And remember that Faulkner himself, without doubt America’s giant of twentieth-century novelists, once had to be rescued from impending obscurity largely through the critical interest of the French.
All of which has gotten me trying to figure out this whole business of what the French do choose to anoint. I should announce beforehand that I am but a curious observer and no real expert. I will give a warning, as well, that the reasons forthcoming may portray a situation not entirely pure or even as on-the-level as may be assumed by that remaindered sad-sack author dreaming of someday being decorated with the little ribbon of a chevalier (or whatever the name of that honor is) in a drawing room of the frilled Élysée Palace (or wherever that kind of ceremony does, in fact, go on).
I know already what you’re saying to yourself. If the French are such cultural arbiters, what’s the deal on their Jerry Lewis thing? A perfect place to begin.
It should be emphasized that the popularity of, with no small measure of reverence for, Jerry Lewis in France isn’t merely a gag. I have gone into the cinema section of bookstores, and right along with serious studies on Goddard and Truffaut there can be several books of similar scholarly consideration of Jerry Lewis; I have been cornered during a Parisian dinner party by a highly regarded French film scholar who openly rhapsodized to me about him. I even remember being in Paris when the movie The King of Comedy was to be aired on French TV for the first time; the buildup to the event was substantial, with ads on the channel all week for it, as one rainy November evening the population seemed to settle in en masse for what was to be a ritual of just viewing what is admittedly a very uncharacteristic, darkly harrowing Lewis film done by Scorsese. Jerry’s standing, of course, rests primarily on roles that employ his particular trademark brand of slapstick humor, starting with a string of hits when teaming up with Dean Martin and having to include foremost his own solo tour de force, The Nutty Professor. When I once teasingly asked a buddy of mine, no less than a French theoretical physicist himself, to try to explain the fascination of his people with a guy who most Americans saw as—to borrow from another comedian’s film title—an outright jerk, my friend couldn’t have dealt me a more revealing answer, even if it was intended as a put-down. To enjoy the full effect here you have to try to hear a voice speaking in acquired English, and I’ll supply the cheesy, yet I trust effective, accent:
“We like Je-ree Lew-ees bee-cause he ees so Am-er-ree-can.”
As they say, “Touché! ” and then some.
Ultimately revealing, too, because when you think of it, Jerry Lewis in his major comedy roles (set aside here the deconstructing of his persona as a celebrity in a later film like The King of Comedy) is an exaggeration of the good-hearted, well-meaning, innocent, anything-but-suave package that does often define the prototypical everyday American, vaguely jerkish.
On a more recent trip to teach in France, I walked into an empty classroom to sit down and enjoy a lunch I’d packed, and I noticed the room had been freshly decorated with a mural on the rear wall that I hadn’t seen before. This was at Université Paris X-Nanterre, a relatively new American-style campus just beyond the skyscrapers of the La Défense business district on the west
ern edge of the city. (I’ve been a visiting faculty member at the university at Nanterre twice, and my other time teaching in France was a semester at Université Paul Valéry, part of the sprawling university system in sunny Montpellier on the Mediterranean and an ancient seat of learning where notables like Rabelais and Nostradamus once studied.) It seems that in adorning a classroom for Études Anglo-Américaines—British and American Studies, covering literature and culture—the mural was true to the spirit of the departmental name in devoting half the wall to scenes from America and the other half to scenes from the U.K. In bright colors on the American side stretched a collage of, from left to right: a frontier locomotive; a steamboat; a Colt six-shooter; a big Confederate flag; a fan of playing cards and some rolled dice, complete with scattered greenbacks; a hot dog (actually, more like a French saucisse sandwich, sort of a pig-in-a-blanket deal); a guy with sideburns playing a guitar on a rickety country porch; bowling pins; a motel; a cluster of skyscrapers; a drive-in movie screen; and a black-and-white police car. The icons are clichéd and ridiculously stock, but, you have to admit, they are so American. (Also, to show that such sentiment was rather simplistic for at least one French student during those uneasy Iraq War times, when anti-American feeling ran high, this wag wielding a felt marking pen had managed to draw the outline of a hooded Klansman above the Confederate flag, with a label on his sheet saying “USSA”; the top of the police car was scrawled over with the word “Murderers.” I won’t go through the imagery on the U.K. side of the mural, except to say that it hadn’t fared much better at the hand of the felt-marker citoyen; there, part of the easy symbolism of the artist was a depiction of the Beatles and in front of them a bulb-haired girl dancing in a classic and very scant Carnaby Street miniskirt—certainly no need to detail the inserted salacious commentary on that—and right over the image of gray Windsor Castle, the black scrawl of the marker shouted: “Free Ireland!”) In other words, I think the cardinal rule of what the French take to is what they see as, true, so American.
More specifically, what interests the French, as the mural shows—in the stars-and-bars banner, the steamboat, the Mississippi River gambling paraphernalia, the guy on the down-home porch with a guitar—has often tended to be the American South, which, when you think of it, sometimes does provide an exaggeration of everything American.
Faulkner was a Southerner, Poe too. Georgia novelist Erskine Caldwell has been adopted by the French, the subject of serious criticism, while it might be tough to find anybody in the U.S. today remembering more than the title of his steamy 1932 novel Tobacco Road. And, for that matter, Goyen from Confederate East Texas was very much a Southerner, and if not included on French reading lists for general courses in the modern American novel, he has been featured on those for classes in “Littérature du Sud,” the title, in fact, of the course I taught at Nanterre mentioned earlier. Actually, a strange and intriguing application of this Southern fascination made for one of the great modern-day literary hoaxes in France, when jazz musician/writer Boris Vian in 1946 had a notorious bestseller called J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I will spit on your graves), supposedly produced by an American, with Vian using the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan; a cartoon of Southern backwoods decadence and mock-Faulknerian intrigue, it was immediately greeted by many Parisian critics as an important new American work in translation, before rumors started to build and Vian had to finally step in and admit to authorship. In university libraries in France, I’ve noticed that The Sewanee Review and The Southern Review appear to be staples when it comes to periodical holdings, more so than even The Paris Review (founded in Paris and later operating out of George Plimpton’s apartment building in New York City, a journal that is definitely more au courant than either of those other two publications, especially—how should one politely say this, without calling it completely hidebound?—the overtraditional Sewanee Review, with The Paris Review today always ranked among the most influential and esteemed American literary magazines); a major French scholarly journal called Delta, recently defunct, was issued from the university at Montpellier and was originally founded with an emphasis on the examination of American Southern literature.
Not that being American always means being Southern, and there are the skyscraper and the police car in the mural, other accepted icons of America that attract the French as well, allowing for a more urban experience, which often provides the subject in works by our leading contemporary Jewish novelists. In academic circles in France, when it comes to these writers, Malamud seems to hold his own with Bellow, is studied much more than Roth. Of course, in the U.S. Malamud seldom is read at universities anymore, while Bellow with his sheer dazzlement with words (does any recent writer in America produce a better sentence than Bellow?) and Roth with his sheer unpredictable outrageousness, his never-ending verve that can make every new book somehow more daring than the last, both are studied. But more than the other two, Malamud frequently addresses what can be the painfulness of race relations in America head-on (The Tenants primarily, plus some of the stories), and, sad to say, the French automatically assume that unmitigated racial tension is an entity so American, too. By the way, while we may have forgotten John Dos Passos and his energetic cataloguing of the wide panorama of American life in his fine U.S.A. trilogy, he has never really gone out of fashion among French academics.
But it’s not just the “so American” element, certainly. Other factors may be as, or even more, important. Two cases of anointing that nicely get at these other issues entail the keen interest in the late John Hawkes, and, more recently, Paul Auster.
France has always been a place where literary experiment is not only tolerated but encouraged. Don’t forget that it was this atmosphere that lured an entire generation to Paris in the twenties, attracting its share of Americans and British, also one very notable Irishman, needless to add. While American publishing has probably from the start been closely, and hopelessly, shackled to what America is really all about (yes, money and the shabby commercialism it engenders, a situation that Hawthorne and Melville themselves complained of), the tenor in France is surely different—the idea of Art with the old capital A has seldom been challenged; rather than large conglomerates controlling close to all publishing, one of the most respected publishers—to some the most respected—remains a smaller independent operation principally devoted to the cutting edge and with no overtly commercial fare, Éditions de Minuit. The spirit of this has long been infectious, and in a twelve-item list called “Proclamation” that introduced the premier issue of the expatriate Paris-based journal Contact in 1928 (contributors to it including Hart Crane, Hemingway, and Joyce during the writing of Finnegan’s Wake, along with his promoting lieutenants), the final four items seem to aptly summarize:
9.We are not concerned with the propagation of sociological ideas, except to emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology.
10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
11. The writer expresses, he does not communicate.
12. The plain reader be damned.
Or, to paraphrase a line in one of the who knows how many Surrealist manifestos from the time: “If writing makes sense, it’s journalism not art.”
Lately, I myself made it a point to carefully reread through much of John Hawkes, probably our own leading modern surrealist in fiction, and the absolute integrity of his experiment is most impressive. Through a fullness of language marked by a heightened sense of color and startling metaphor, Hawkes, in his peak period of production, moves amid semi-hallucinatory landscapes as diverse as Nazi Germany, the London horse racing world, and the desert American West. (The last of these is a second novel, The Beetle Leg, his sole major experimental work set entirely in the U. S. Nevertheless, if not in geography then in temperament, Hawkes is “so American,” with his outsider’s stance that bucks the ruling popular norm—call such rebellion “radical innocence”—an offbeat, New World something that does mark an attribute most distinctive in the American l
iterary character: i.e., not only Poe and Faulkner, but outsiders Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, too.) Hawkes seldom provides an easy read, in his earlier, loosely plotted fiction, anyway; he purposefully blurs for startling nightmarish effects, and work like his has more than once been ridiculed here as just claptrap, Hawkes himself falling prey to such treatment in extended form, I remember, by one of those young critics who have perennially come along to try to make a name for themselves by noisy bashing, typically in the conservative-camp house organs like Commentary or The New Criterion. Hawkes’s best writing is, in truth, usually a very difficult prose, not at all aimed at the “plain reader”; as it near always loudly announces right on the first page: Let such species indeed be damned! Which doesn’t bother the French, and in their tradition that produced the valiant, ultra-experimental schools of the Nouveau Roman in the fifties and then Oulipo after that, difficulty, and making the reader work a little for the big payoff, is often exactly what the whole point of authentic literary art entails. I personally can’t recall anybody in my own English department at the University of Texas—which might have the largest faculty of literature professors of any institution in the country—teaching Hawkes, who received considerable scholarly attention in the U. S. early in his career, though fell out of favor later on, faring not much better than Goyen; Hawkes’s last book to be published before he died, An Irish Eye, was given but a stubby and tepid paragraph on The New York Times Book Review’s “Books in Brief” page. Or, nobody had taught Hawkes at UT until two years back, when a professor from Paris came to Austin on exchange. He assigned Second Skin, among Hawkes’s most challenging novels, to an undergraduate class, and he told me later that the students, who maybe had had their fill of the easy realism of so much currently “in” American writing, from Richard Ford to Amy Tan, loved the essential difficulty of it.
The City at Three P.M. Page 10