The City at Three PM

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:

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 western 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 literary 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.

As a note, I might insert here that from my observation, the recent boom in American multicultural writing hasn’t impressed the French intelligentsia to any great degree, or it hadn’t when I was there. It could be that in its complexity it doesn’t reduce itself to the easy clichés as depicted in the mural I spoke about, even though I’d argue that more than anything the basic idea of multiculturalism is intrinsically and wonderfully American; or it could be that the straightforward narration and sentimental approach in many (surely not all) such works, which could often bring Oprah to crocodile tears, come across as so old-fashioned and utterly traditional—read “bourgeois”—that outside of celebrating writers of substantial, proven verbal and structural prowess like Toni Morrison, the French appear not to have wholeheartedly taken to it. Meanwhile, the usual suspects of dazzling sixties and seventies experimenters are still those who frequently constitute contemporary American reading lists at French universities—Pynchon, Gass, Bartheleme, Gaddis, Coover, and Hawkes—and when I asked one professor at Nanterre how she could put together a course reading list of contemporary American work that didn’t include at least one female author or somebody of color, I got a dismissing look that seemed to say that I was an adult, wasn’t I, and I should know better—that literature is not sociology; the exchange put me in the role of just an American jerk, Jer-ee Lew-ees’s doppelganger, all right, standing there lost in the haughtily named Salle des Professeurs, a ramshackle faculty lounge and mailroom. Anyway, getting back to Hawkes, today in France his reputation remains quite solid, but it becomes trickier with another experimenter—or apparently an experimenter—Paul Auster.

To be frank, it’s very complicated, a case that shows how the French attitudes, which up until this stage in my admittedly random personal observing seem pretty logical, to the point of easy predictability, can possibly backfire.

In a gracefully written 1957 book-length study called The French Face of Edgar Poe, Patrick F. Quinn analyzes Gallic fervor for Poe; in an opening chapter called “But What Do They See in Him?” he talks of an explanation expressed by writer Laura Riding and notes:

The essential clue to this, according to Laura Riding, is that Poe always preserved a very respectful attitude towards French culture, and the French have been gracious enough to return the compliment. The two Poe heroes who are preeminently perspicacious and logical men, Dupin and Legrand, are endowed by Poe with French ancestry so that their intellectual clarity may seem the more plausible. Poe had, seems to have had, a wide acquaintance with and a warm appreciation of French literature and philosophy, and by using, for the most part correctly, a good many French words and phrases, he offered the best credential the French could wish to see—a good knowledge of their language.

Riding might have been onto something very fundamental, despite Quinn not giving much credence to the opinion. He concludes it simply served as a handy thesis to support Riding’s own biases concerning the mustached, shadowy-eyed master of horror as, in her blunt words, “a mediocre but vulgar talent.” But, to continue on this tack, it does appear to figure into Paul Auster’s truly phenomenal popularity in the last dozen or more years in serious circles in France.

If at least one relatively recent book by Auster—Hand to Mouth, which contains an extended, maybe narcissistic autobiographical essay and an assembly of some of his very early apprentice writings—earned only a “Books in Brief” squib in The New York Times Book Review, and a glib one at that, in France Auster is so talked about and widely read that he has become a bit of a media personality. (I should make clear that I’m certainly not holding forth the NYTBR as any arbiter of final importance; however, as a writer who himself has written for the Times Book Review—once, which was enough for me, after a staff editor reworded about half of what I wrote, taking the teeth out of any critical opinion expressed therein—and also suffered on a story collection of my own the “Books in Brief” brush-off of the ilk that has been mentioned here, albeit a kind and praising little notice, I think I can be honest about what such treatment means and doesn’t mean as a somewhat useful barometer of standing.) A new Paul Auster book in translation will invariably merit a giant advertising placard in the Paris Métro stations. I’ve seen an almost comically reverential article, long, where a reporter for the high-brow Parisian daily Libération followed Auster around his New York apartment quietly recording his every move from kitchen to study, from study to kitchen, etc., as the newspaperman elevates the day to nearly that in the life of a minor saint; a number of years ago Auster, also involved in filmmaking, was a member of the “jury” at the Cannes film festival, an entity as culturally meaningful as the big rise of exposed trestling and escalator paraphernalia commonly called the Centre Pompidou or the goldenly flaky morning croissant (among our own easy clichés for France?).

Auster had the right stuff for ascendancy. What is usually considered his most intriguing work, The New York Trilogy, an early trio of narratives often with detective-novel overtones, originally appeared from a small press in America, Sun & Moon out of Los Angeles, possibly indicating an attractive neglect at the time by the massive, basically profit-driven publishing powers that be in America. Also, the French flat-out adore detective novels—what they call policiers—and the detective novel at its best is, of course, an American form, the origin sometimes being traced back to stories by Poe (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Purloined Letter”). Actually, the grand execution of the form—the more noir and hardboiled the better, replete with felt “Bogey” fedoras, rain at night in the muddy Hollywood hills, and leggy, overlipsticked dames with blond poodle cuts and rich, rich daddies—entails the kind of icons that also could have found their way into that classroom mural, along with the bowling pins and the hot dog, granting the latter did look more Parisian than Coney-esque in the depiction. I thought it telling that while teaching at Nanterre on my last trip, I found in the photocopy room some extra copies of the first page of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice lying around, being used as a text in an introductory translation course. In The New York Trilogy, Auster can play a very intriguing game with the detective-novel genre, poking fun at it while taking its conventions seriously enough to give it a fresh, and tricky, intellectual application, which seems to be aiming at a postmodern metaphysical legerdemain smack in the Borges tradition (the French revere the Argentine wizard); that intent qualifies it as being at least potentially experimental and avant-garde, even if the prose is strictly straightforward.

Add to that the fact that his gamesmanship with the reader echoes a ton of French literary theory, which for a time seemed to be defining France as a land of high-tech critic/ linguists rather than actual practicing poets and novelists, while the likes of Barthes and Derrida argued, admittedly quite interestingly, for the end of authorial authority, with every reader, bien sûr, his or her own Sun King. Auster himself, a New Jersey guy who went to Columbia, lived in France when younger and has done considerable translating of French works into English; before his fiction garnered much response he was known as the editor of the Random House anthology of modern French poetry, and some of The New York Trilogy actually is set in France, a location treated with admiration. The old literal French connection, what Riding saw as helping Poe, maybe kicked into high gear.

I have asked one French novelist—somebody who teaches American literature and is distinguished enough as a writer to have once had a book of his own short-listed for the Prix Goncourt—about Auster, and he said the ultimate anointing was when a novel by Auster, Moon Palace, was put on a list for an annual national competitive examination in France for what amounts to higher-level teaching certification in various fields, a test called the Agrégation. This is where the plot becomes as tight as that in a good policier, maybe as tawdry, too.

In the distant past, acceptance in France was usually more a matter of the earnest effort of a single person, often without much accompanying widespread or institutional backing. Baudelaire became fixated on the work of Poe, a figure he considered, no doubt, “mon semblable, mon frère,” and about whom, it’s said, he told his mother that this man on the other side of the Atlantic had already dreamed his own dreams, to the extent that Baudelaire possibly spent more long hours translating Poe’s work than he did composing his own in his rather short lifetime. Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, a legendary French translator who lived and taught in the United States, worked hard in the thirties to give a faithful rendition of The Sound and the Fury and is always credited with introducing the writing of Faulkner to France, where he was enthusiastically taken under wing by Sartre himself in a famous essay examining time in F.’s work; it was Coindreau who translated Goyen, by the way, and therefore introduced him and also many other American authors besides Faulkner to his countrymen. Today, the machinery—a good word for it, several French professors I spoke to agreed—is understandably far more sophisticated and complicated, maybe all leading to the inclusion on the aforementioned Agrégation exam, which I’ll explain in a minute.

The world of those who deal in American writing in France appears a relatively small, very closely connected one, much tighter than anything we could imagine in America. In America (alas, Toto, we must be honest!) favor-trading and such does thrive in literary/academic circles, but even with gossipy, multi-martini-tipsy New York the alleged center, the country itself is so big and so messily and happily diverse— universities with established M.F.A. and Ph.D. programs thousands of miles apart, power bases seemingly everywhere, writers themselves living seemingly everywhere—that there are at least occasionally some built-in checks and balances. In France, many I spoke to were open about, even openly proud of, hearty networking. University jobs are frequently acquired through personal contacts, a lot of publishing is done that way, too; and because literary agents traditionally have been an anomaly in France (though less so lately), to have a cousin who knows somebody who works at Gallimard or Éditions du Seuil is a good way to get your work onto the freeform modernistic desk in a well-appointed office of such a major publisher there in the Left Bank arrondissements. Further, higher education remains mostly under central control, and each time I myself have traveled to France to teach for a semester I’ve received a handsome page announcing my status, a certificate of appointment from the national ministry of education adorned with baroquely official stamps, the whole kit suitable for framing. So in a best-case scenario, for purposes of this discussion, a publisher and academics interested in the publisher’s American author (one of them perhaps the translator, others who may have written on the author and had their own doctoral students give papers on the author at the couple of major national conferences each year on American lit) seem to gladly join forces, if only informally, to generate interest; as said, the final coup is having the book included—via adoption by a panel of prominent academics—as the single contemporary American offering on the list of about ten texts for this Agrégation exam in British and American studies (with a heavy emphasis on literature), sort of a civil service test given along with another exam that awards a lesser certification. Which means many professors at all the universities throughout the country will be lecturing that year on that particular contemporary American writer if he or she is on the list, always a Shakespeare play on it, too, naturally; which means that essay collections and study guides will instantly be prepared on the writer’s work (I had an estimate from a professor recently retired from the university at Poitiers that a student could conceivably spend over 6000 pre-Euro francs, just under a thousand dollars, on books by and about the ten or so authors on the Agrégation), and which also means that this entire yearly crop of those going on to teach literature written in English will perhaps be more familiar with this single contemporary American writer than any other they will deal with in the remainder of their professional lives, convinced that because they are now more or less authorities on the writer, he or she has to be important. Maybe offering a hypothetical equivalent closer to home might help: Think of everybody wishing to advance in university—and most high school—teaching from snowy Bangor, Maine, to balmy Santa Barbara, California, with lost Boone, Iowa, of the fields of shoulder-high corn somewhere in between, expected by the U.S. federal government to sit down one Saturday morning with Bic pens poised, waiting for the starting signal of the United States Department of Education’s American, British, and Commonwealth Studies National Examination that will include questions dealing with ten pre-assigned books—the contemporary American literature representative being Rabbit Run, for example— and you get the idea: suddenly everybody is from then on a Rabbit Run expert and subsequently a John Updike scholar, like it or not. (Updike, incidentally, being the variety of easily approachable social realist who while always translated has never largely attracted the French academics, outside of his single surprisingly avant-garde excursion, The Centaur, a prize-winner there; he was understandably given a good measure of attention in the old USSR, a land of socialist realism.) Several years ago Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, which itself aspires to dreamily scrutinize the American psyche, was included, and that appeared to be the final step in his anointing. Until something a little weird happened once the hype died down.

From my own informal talking to several professors of contemporary American literature in Paris, I found near consensus that they suspect they might have overrated Auster. Auster still sells extremely well in France, is widely read. And the popular media has been very drawn to him, photogenic guy that he is—in France, the universe’s acknowledged epicenter of fashion and the “right look,” physical appearance can also count, and the country has to be among the few places on the globe where male vanity is seen as normal and not affectation; I’ve even read that when Faulkner came to Paris the press gushed about his wonderful silver hair! Anyway, for some of the intelligentsia, Auster today maybe isn’t quite the literary wonder he was first thought to be.

Personally, I’ve had my own doubts, surely finding Auster to be a writer of considerable and serious potential in the very original, even startling, concepts of some of his fictions, yet one who seldom pays off on the promise of the plot. He is often noticeably awkward in his handling of basics like narrative pacing, clichéd in his descriptive observation—New York street people straight from Central Casting or his Paris a somewhat tour-book Paris, that sort of thing—and occasionally a touch pretentious, especially in what seems his ongoing posturing about postmodernism—recurrent suggestion of deep intertextuality, and self-referential bending of genres between fiction and autobiography—while the product being delivered before the reader’s eyes is in a style that instead of being anything validly postmodern, sometimes appears to have even missed much of the message of modernism; I mean, the narration now and then could just as well be that of standard, more mass-marketable easy realism, if it were written a bit less unevenly. Still, Poe could be uneven, too, one must emphasize, bordering on clumsy, and many times the work of a raw, exciting talent doesn’t look smooth or academically—meaning “sleepily”—correct. And, above all, compared to the knuckleheaded tome that occasionally does find its way to the cover-feature, two-thousand-word plus treatment with color artwork by the NYTBR—another slick comedy-of-manners novel about a midlife yuppie divorce or whatever—just about anything by Auster is pure, uncut Proust or James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

In offering his own lukewarm response to Auster, the recently retired Poitiers professor I alluded to earlier spoke of a rush to judgment and complained to me that the French are too easily excited by anything that looks even faintly postmodern. And during drinks at the terrasse of a café across from the Sorbonne one sweltering late May afternoon, the Parisian professor who was actually the head of the Agrégation committee when Auster was included—the same prof who came to University of Texas on exchange and so nobly put Hawkes on his reading list there—was conditional in his remarks on Auster, stressing that when he was the committee head, with final say, he personally didn’t feel he was anointing anybody as a master whatsoever but just showcasing writers he himself, very personally, thought should be read simply because there was something indeed intriguing, not necessarily immortal, about them; he also gave his opinion that Moon Palace is “the perfect American novel for French readers,” the way it covers a sizable chunk of U.S. geography and culture—the “so American” element again. When I brought up the Auster case with one young guy, a rising academic hotshot teaching at Nanterre who wrote his own dissertation and then a book on Richard Brautigan (Brautigan apparently having always been quietly respected in France and lumped with the rest of the sixties American experimenters mentioned earlier), the hotshot tilted his head so he could maybe hide some behind the twin reflecting lenses of his tortoise-shell glasses, assuring me with no small measure of saving be spectacled face something to the effect of, “Well, Auster’s prose is so simple that he really is quite valuable to work with in the lower-level courses, where our students’ reading knowledge of English isn’t that good”; it was a comment, I might add, that the head of the Agrégation committee I spoke of did smilingly agree with when I mentioned it to him. Also, in the small core library for the university’s British and American Studies department at Nanterre, conscientiously well stocked and serving as an undergraduate library collection for what is considered essential in the field, I found not the expected full shelf of Auster’s many works—novels, poems, screenplays, and nonfiction—but just: The New York Trilogy (even if it is flawed, a fascinating, admirable, and thoroughly worthwhile package, and, to repeat, his very best fiction); Moon Palace, which had been on the exam; a book on his work by a French critic (actually, I do know of at least a few books on him done by American publishers); and one of those hefty, and high-priced, glossy-covered study guides with essays by professors from throughout France, which had been assembled, according to that cover, specifically to help prep for the test that had addressed Moon Palace.

I suppose what could have happened is that in the ultimate twist and, in essence, a very postmodern way—where contradictions are the norm, nothing is certain, the assurance of smug and logical closure is for hopeless simpletons, and so on—Auster’s credentials that led to his being celebrated in France were too perfect; every piece of the puzzle was so precisely in place, showing the full panoramic picture of the qualities the French savor, as discussed here, that something almost had to go wrong, in an unraveling that deconstructed the entire system, for a proof of the invalidity of any system. (And you beloved deconstructionists of faded yesteryear, even if your inner circle went a little over the top in those official edicts on theory issued in the U.S. from party headquarters at posh Yale, you voiced more than a few intriguing critical ideas!) I told you this could get complicated.

Overall, the French do have an uncanny sense, as backed by a winning track record, in figuring out what we ourselves sometimes overlook and don’t realize is our significant writing, maybe just because we are too close to it. Though, to be honest, I think that some off their interests are often not that different from what we ourselves Stateside do take seriously and not so seriously. James Ellroy, popular here, is extremely popular in France even as writers of policiers go; he appeared on French TV when I was last in Paris, himself acting like an absurd parody of the hip, tough-guy detective novelist and using terms like “daddy-o” for the voiceover translation, which seemed like exactly what the French interviewer wanted to hear. As of this writing, my Parisian sources, who might be viewed as reliable handicappers in this competition, tell me that Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, each with a following in France already and two of the very best fiction writers we have right now, which we ourselves generally acknowledge (except for the author of a confused, much-discussed Atlantic article some time ago, who with forced naiveté and shameless misreading thump-ingly bashed them, along with Auster), and they should turn up sooner or later on that sacred Agrégation, DeLillo most likely the sounder bet. One correspondent says that so-called Rocky Mountain fiction, by popular writers like Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane and their mostly Montana cohorts, has emerged as fashionable, but it certainly hasn’t yet generated attention like that afforded the Southern when it comes to American writing. In addition, it should be noted that the French make a real effort to translate so much American writing. I can’t stress enough that the authors I’ve concentrated on here as venerated to some extent are those who have been regularly studied and written about beyond simple newspaper, radio, and television reviews—of which there are still a lot in France—and it is amazing to see how much American fiction does get translated, especially considering how embarrassingly little of their work makes its way into our bookstores. And, again, concerning the matter of our neglected authors: Set aside for a moment the unchallengeable, beat-the-crowd celebration of Poe and Faulkner by the French, and for me merely the single truth that they created a classroom audience and in-depth study for a book like The House of Breath that it never really enjoyed in the man’s own country, where prevailing tastes and values are such that a wannabe literary maestro like the late James Michener—blatantly commercially oriented, in spite of his aspiration to be seen otherwise—once had his visage displayed on the side of those tan Barnes & Noble plastic shopping bags that have also featured greats like Joyce and Woolf, yes, the French honoring Goyen is enough for me to validate their taste, however strangely the system dictating it sometimes works. Believe me, if you haven’t read it, The House of Breath is that rare.

So for the moping, slighted novelist here Stateside, the one who never has benefited from something like the former book-club queen Oprah’s soppy praise—“These are real tears, girl!”—resulting in hefty sales and who cringes at the sight of any remainder table, adulation in France remains well worth the time spent fantasizing about it, to ease the hurt some, if nothing else.

As for the Jerry Lewis thing, go out and rent The Nutty Professor; fast forward to the scene of cool, Rat Pack-style Buddy Love with a rumpled sport jacket and hiply loosened thin tie trying to slowly, seductively croon a nightclub number at an off-campus bar called the Purple Pit when his magic potion is kicking in and out of gear, and in the midst of the hilarious, and deeply frightening, schizophrenia he keeps slipping into the squeaky falsetto of the bucktoothed Nutty Professor himself, a sequence that goes well beyond simple slapstick and may be as valuable as anything in the history of classic American cinematic comedy, Chaplin included.

Watch it, and you decide if it isn’t utter—not to put too fine a point on it—genius.

Some of the situation portrayed in this essay has surely changed since it was written a while back, but I trust my essential premises and conclusions remain reasonably sound, so I won’t address all the details, just a few.

On a more recent trip to teach for a semester at a university in France—the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris this time—I witnessed what could only be seen as a phenomenon, the way Philip Roth’s stock had skyrocketed there—which makes sense, seeing that much of the later work in his long career, like American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, does treat directly and without compromise the “so-Americanness” of things. And—belatedly, and very long overdue—there seemed to be a good deal of keen interest in and a most respectful awakening to the value and importance of the best new multicultural American literature, most notably that of our wonderful younger writers.

Also, granted I do argue here for the seriousness with which the French in general treat literature and their eye for what’s truly lasting and in a place where best-sellerdom doesn’t seem necessary to establish the worth of a book (sometimes it can mean the mark of unpardonable crassness to French readers and a prime reason to shy away from a book, actually), yet that might be changing, too, if it hasn’t started to show large signs of having done so already. The old, venerable French publishing houses are becoming much more commercial-oriented, as may be indicated by just the fact that flashy novel covers and artwork for them are now the norm, rather than the simple uniform plain covers— devoid of any artwork and bearing only the author’s name and title, along with the publisher’s colophon—that were for years used on all books issued by any single house (Gallimard still often uses its distinctive beige and red, and Grasset its pale yellow, but they appear to be among the last holdouts), and many of the smaller independent houses are being sadly overshadowed by the bigger, ever-expanding conglomerate publishing concerns, as began to rapidly happen a few dozen years ago in the U.S., where, never mind overshadowing, most just got gobbled up or fast disappeared. I offered this observation about the changing scene in France to a French friend at dinner recently, a brilliant scholar herself who was visiting Austin, to see if she agreed, and she responded with a slow shaking of the head and a lowering of the hooded eyelids, feeling the pain of maybe the frank and honest chill of Gallic sang froid in the veins, if not outright, taken-for-granted pessimism, as she whisperingly asked what nobody in any quadrant of this big and glorious globe of ours really wants to hear: “Will anybody even be reading serious literature in fifty years?”

I managed to slap my hands to my ears before she got it all out. No kidding, I really did, looking foolish in the Austin restaurant where I performed it, but suitably expressing my own deep and stubborn and total optimism, nevertheless, which I hope against hope isn’t only more Yankee dumb naiveté on this score, in a time of assaults on the printed word itself coming from many directions as we move deeper and deeper into a new, thoroughly electronic and perhaps increasingly frivolous age.