The French Thing

BY JOHN COLEMAN TE T Mr. Heppenstall set the scene for us. Ii To literary editors' offices there will already have gone out copies of a book jacketed in shiny black, white and orange. It is called The Four/old Tradition and described as 'notes on the French and English literatures, with some ethnological and historical asides.' On the back of the wrapper, there is a photograph of me smiling confidently, alas. 'Soon wipe that silly grin off his face,' 1 can imagine narrow- eyed literary editors muttering as they assign the book to some Eng. Lit. hatchet man.

The context of all this prescience is an essay, 'The Anatomy of Francophobia,' in the current Twentieth Century and we might do well to have a look at it before passing on to the larger work.* Part of Mr. Heppenstall's argument runs something like this: Francophobes abound in present-day England; Oxbridge undergrad- uates between thirty and forty who studied English literature at university are peculiarly prone to be monoglot and anti-French, possibly in reaction to the confessed Francophily of Sir Harold Nicolson, Raymond Mortimer and Cyril Connolly, certainly encouraged in this by Dr. Leavis and his Oxford funnel,, F. W. Bateson; the Spectator's book-pages have been a notorious haven for these French-haters for some years past. Mr. Heppenstall acknowledges recent signs of a tiny thaw: Geoffrey Grigson ('of whom one [Mr. Heppenstall] had thought mainly as a botanist and authority on country parsonages') wrote a piece here last December on Robbe- Grillet, and soon afterwards Professor Kermode managed a review on Apollinaire, even if he did get his French wrong. Better yet, the Observer of a few weeks ago (the Spectator isn't the only haven, apparently) showed us John Wain flashing the odd French word quite to the manner born and quoting Jean-Paul Sartre. This last particularly rejoiced Mr. Heppenstall who had already proposed, in The Fourfold Tradi- tion,

There is no gifted contemporary young English,

writer to whom the French writers mean so

much as (I feel) they could mean to Mr. Wain. And there he is, letting them mean something to him already. 'Good for old Wain, I say.' The essay concludes with an illustration—the case of the author's son—of how to expose the young to 'the French thing': the son ended up playing wrist-games on the beach with the French boys— 'It no longer matters what university course he pursues.' I don't know about that: he won't get a Blue playing wrist-games and being able to speak French is, after all, being able to speak French, not a way of life.

But where, anyway, are all these serried Francophobes who so exercise Mr. Heppenstall? In The Fourfold Tradition Amis, C. P. Snow and Wain (with the above reservations) are stig- matised as `liking it here.' He implies that anyone who comes under 'Leavisite influence' will be stonily impervious to French literature whereas the facts are that it is in Scrutiny that }ou will find much of Martin Turnell's finest criticism, that Dr. Leavis's students were (and presumably are) expected, to be able to read French with some fluency, and that—since Mr. Heppenstall's procedures are frequently auto- biographical, I may perhaps reply in kind—it was a perfectly normal thing, even encouraged, * THE FOURFOLD TRADITION. By Rayner Heppen- stall. (Barrie and Rockliff, 25s.) to switch as I did to Modern Languages instead of doing Part II of the English Tripos. Mr. Heppenstall should know better than to refloat such leaky canards. He should also be aware of his impertinence in condescending to Professor Kermode, though it is always possible, of course, that he has never read that critic's Romantic Image, which shows a keener appreciation of 'the French thing' than any I can detect in Mr. Heppenstall's writings.

For it is to 'the French thing' that we must come now and to some discussion of The Four- fold Tradition. The first chapter deals with the sundering of England and France and with Joan of Arc's place therein: it is confused, knowledgeable and entertaining. On to it are tacked three pages mentioning the 'peaks of Anglo-French literary intercourse' between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries: Chaucer and Gower, Charles d'Orldans, Spenser/du Bellay, our Restoration theatre. The following chapter attempts to show, with a good deal of condensed learning, that we should be more careful how we use the word Celtic: lit] has never had any respectable application to any but the inhabitants of central France in the last century BC.' Next we move on to some account of the cult of the noble savage as it changed down the years, studied through various English and French explorations of the island of Tahiti. The fourth• chapter furnishes a potted biography of William Beckford and suggests that what have become known as The Episodes of Vathek should be in- corporated into the original, pirated volume. Any misgivings one may by now be feeling as to Mr. Heppenstall's direction and purpose seem to me to be consolidated by these sentences: In the historical perspective of this book, the special importance of Beckford is that he wrote as much in French as in English, which no important writer had done since Gower. But for the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, the return to full bi-lingualism might well have become a pattern for our writers. . . . By a pleasant coincidence, our one true bi-lingual writer at the present day bears a surname' which begins with the same four letters as Beck- ford's.

From Gower to Vathek to Molloy: a rich pros- pect indeed. What conceivable benefit does Mr. Heppenstall think accrues from having two languages to write in? Does he visualise the Great Macaronic Novel? Are they to be used alternately ('I'm feeling terribly French today. Put out my machine with the accents on, coco')? Surely one Finnegans Wake, the mad end of such reveries, has been enough?

It is of a certain wry interest that, as Mr. Heppenstall points out in his next chapter, during the nineteenth century and great period of the English novel, our two countries devel- oped more independently of each other than ever before. This chapter explains the 'fourfold' tradition. Each of our countries has (or has had) its aristocratic, privileged, non-creative, metro- politan class—the implications are Mr. Heppen- stall's, not mine—and this is the class seen as enshrining `tradition.' The 'second' tradition, which is the one almost all our art has come from, is essentially non-conformist, provincial, radical. Here, as elsewhere, the author seems to be tilting at windmills: That our greatest poet . . . was a butcher's

son from Warwickshire is a scandal to the metropolitan mind, which every now and then insists on proving that some nobleman must have written those plays.

A couple of cracked Baconians don't make an Establishment. I suppose what is really meant

is that not much of our art has been produced by the rich for some considerable time, now and that a lot' of our artists were born elsewhere than

London. One wouldn't argue with that, as reasonably applicable to both here and across the Channel: it is hard to imagine, though, that the 'view-finder' with which this statement pro-, vides Mr. Heppenstall is likely to frame and focus any bewilderingly new prospects.

Nor, in the crowded chapters that ensue, does it. Dujardin's Les Lauriers son: coupes is resur- rected as the father of the interior monologue and some of the plot of Ulysses summarised. There is some talk of Kierkegaard and Kafka

('I suggest that, in Kafka, prose narrative aspires

more successfully than elsewhere to the condi- tion of music'). There are notes—after all. we were promised 'notes'—on Bernanos, Mauriac, Jouhandeau, Camus and Sartre. I confess to knowing nothing of Jouhandeau, but the little summaries and expositions provided for some of the others presuppose a mythic Francophobe audience of really comprehensive ignorance.

And with Beckett and the information that in London he drinks stout and smokes French cigarettes, and the carrot dangled before Kings- ley Amis of a France that offers racehorses and cyclists, 'good footballers and jazz, wine used not as the object of a cult but for quenching thirst' (Postilion Makes You Drunk'?), we are down to the sort of French thing generally left to a Bureau du Tourisme. Nor, oddly enough, are we so very far from the nostalgic French thingthat Mr. Heppenstall rather deplores elsewhere—the handful of invalid's snapshots and cracker mottoes from Peguy shuffled, not so long ago, by Palinurus: images of an exotic, lapidary para- dise where even the memory of a vespasienne brings tears to the eye.

Apparently one has to be very careful of other people's memories of Abroad (if 1 may purloin a capital from Mr. Amis). 1 was leapt on in Encounter some time last year, by Mr. Hilary Corke, for daring to suggest that Durrell's Alexandrian tetralogy was something less, a good deal less, in fact, than a masterpiece. A fellow- reviewer and I were jointly and somewhat heavily caricatured as 'Brother Criticus.' So far as I remember this figure was of low birth, thought itself lucky to have found its fare to Italy one year for its summer hols, and generally lacked the advantages of this Mr. Corke who had been around, knew a whore from a handsaw, and wasn't going to allow any jealous scholar- ship boy to stop him from settling back and scratching with pleasure as the Alexandrian backcloth unrolled.

D. J. Enright's characteristically measured, funny and humane analysist of the appeal of Durrell's four books brings this back to mind. He taught in Alexandria for a time, as he gently establishes, and it sadly seems as if some such small flourish of the passport is needed at the moment to combat certain of the playboys of Western criticism: critical debate has adjourned! here and there to that level. But were, in the event, my greatly enjoyed years in France neces.I'` sary to my firm present conviction that—whili, French literature is a glory and our own at given moments inescapably its debtor—it hasn't much' • to teach us through Beckett and Robbe-Grillet?

t in INTERNATIONAL LITERARY ANNUAL 3. Edited by Arthur Boyars and Pamela Lyon. (Calder, 15s.) Of course we will read French, of course we will try to keep up. But Philip Toynbee in that same number of the Twentieth Century is prob- ably right—in terms of actually achieved works, not hopeful gekures—to accept that a more genuinely useful, intelligent cross-fertilisation is likely to be going on between America and our- selves at the present moment. A pity, perhaps, that Calder's International Literary Annual has only an American-dominated section of excerpts from the latterday surrealists, fashionably expatriated in Paris, to keep us in touch with the American scene. But this third annual seems to me, granting that literary annuals are in the main dedicated to the propositions that it is possible to say something useful about yearly 'trends' and that a reviewer's worm's-eye view of what's going on in Yugoslavia is better than nothing at all, more alert to the hazards of its condition than usual. It's chic, in that it has pieces on science fiction and poetry-plus-jazz, but it's also positively helpful. Frank Kermode offers an essay on William Golding, there is Enright on Durrell, Ronald Bryden has contrived to chart a passage through the disparate islands of 'British Fiction 1959-60,' and Mr. Heppenstall reassesses Claudel.