Hyperion - Nietzsche Circle

English have any talent for the novel, with a few exceptions.
MCP. Contemporary, you mean?
P. No, all through. I think the English novel much inferior to the French novel
or the Russian novel—or even the American novel. We have not written
novels very long but I think France, Russia and America and Spain have
much greater novelistic imagination. The only English novels that I think are
really distinguished from the point of view of imagination are Emily Brontë’s,
Lawrence Sterne’s. But I think the other English novels are really sociological.
Dickens is much inferior to Dostoievski, I think, or Turgeniev, or Flaubert,
or Proust. He’s an entertainer. Of course he’s wonderful, he’s a wonderful
writer, but I don’t think he’s a great writer like Flaubert. The English novel is
very stodgy and middle class. The great Elizabethan plays are not that. The
Victorians are the worst—Thackeray and George Eliot—I like George Eliot the
best but I find her too parochial, in the worst sense. There is nothing wrong
about writing about rural life but I don’t find what they had in the plays.
MCP. What about French writers?
P. My favorite is Flaubert. And I like Rabelais—parts of him. I like him when
he piles up word after word. The word play: I love that. Now I have the original
French so I can look at that. Some of Balzac I like. But I don’t admire Balzac
so much as an artist. For me there is too much in it. But I greatly admire Les
Illusions Perdues—that’s very great. I think he’s a very great writer. Much
greater than Dickens. Because Dickens had that Victorian—there is no sex in
Dickens, it’s all disguised in very strange ways—and you feel that the sawdust
is coming out of the characters. They are not flesh and blood characters.
They’re dolls. And George Eliot too. And I don’t like Thackeray, ugh! The one
English novelist I admire is Thomas Hardy. For me, there’s Emily Brontë and
Lawrence Sterne, and Thomas Hardy, and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All
Flesh. Those are great.
MCP. You would not say that you like a French writer like Voltaire?
P. No. There is too much reason. I used to like Candide. But for me it’s too
intellectual and rational.
MCP. Candide is a little like Malcolm.
P. Yes. Well I love that book. I’ve read it many many times. But among other
French writers one I like is Rousseau: The Confessions—I love that—and
Proust I admire greatly. I think he’s a giant.
MCP. Gide?
P. No. I don’t like him. He is too “bourgeois” too. I think I keep using that word
for want of a better. But I don’t like him at all. Some of Sartre and some of
Facing Page:
Portrait of Richard Purdy by Gertrude Abercrombie, 1955 /
unidentified photographer: photographic print: b&w; 25 x 20 cm.
Courtesy of the Gertrude Abercrombie papers, 1880-1986,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Hyperion—Volume VI, issue 1, March 2011 138