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As You Were Saying eds Fabrice Rozié, Esther Allen and Guy Walter
Dalkey Archive, £5.99
In 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre visited the US at the invitation of the American Office of War Information. He was following in the footsteps not only of that most famous of transatlantic literary voyagers, Alexis de Tocqueville, but also those of Chateaubriand and Céline. Sartre’s visit attracted the attention of Time magazine, which reported that during his stay, the “short, square-shouldered” “philosopher-playwright” had developed a taste for corned beef hash and chocolate ice cream, not to mention an “awed liking” for “squalor-spotted, ill-mannered New York City.”
The pieces Sartre filed home for Le Figaro and Combat had a rather different flavour. Manhattan, he wrote, was a vast “rock desert” in which thousands of houses built of brick, wood or reinforced concrete appeared to be “on the point of flying away.” Indeed, all the American cities Sartre visited seemed to him touched by a sense of impermanence or lightness. The prefabs he saw in Fontana, Tennessee, on a tour of the Tennessee Valley Authority, were American dwellings par excellence, fragile and provisional; and even in New York, he was struck by the “flimsiness of the building materials used.”
Time put a heroically optimistic gloss on these articles, noting that Sartre had said he felt freer in the unending vastness of America’s “open cities” than in the enclosed spaces of the European metropolis. Yet the price of that liberty, for Sartre, was a kind of permanent vulnerability to nature. He wrote of the storms that regularly inundated the avenues of Manhattan and the cockroaches that scuttled across his kitchen floor: “Even in my apartment a hostile, deaf, mysterious Nature assails me. I seem to be camping in the heart of a jungle swarming with insects.”
The unliveable, insupportable American megalopolis had been a recurrent theme in much French writing about the US in the 1920s and 1930s. And in his postwar letters home, Sartre was simply recycling the noxious anti-American imagery of books such as Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (said, incidentally, to be one of Nicolas Sarkozy’s favourite novels) and Georges Duhamel’s apocalyptic travelogue Scènes de la vie future. This was an essentially aesthetic, cultural and literary animus, distinct from the political, largely Marxian, hostility towards the US for which Sartre would later become a prominent cheerleader.
It is intriguing, therefore, to find a very faithful facsimile of this sort of thing in As You Were Saying, a slender collection of stories described by its editors as the latest episode in a centuries-long “romance” between French and American writers (they mention La Fayette and Benjamin Franklin, Baudelaire and Henry James). The book contains seven pairs of very brief stories, in which American writers “respond” to their French counterparts (the French stories always come first).
Philippe Claudel’s “Still Life” opens with a description of the “endless black ribbons of our suburban freeways,” reminiscent of something Sartre said about the streets in American cities being “routes nationales,” so immense and boundless are these urban agglomerations. Claudel’s streets are indistinguishable from one another, and “all lead to the same place,” while his city centres are, inevitably, people-less deserts in which the wind howls down the “canyons between the great towers.” Céline imagined American couples as “large, if rather docile, beasts”; Claudel depicts them as docile, wealthy strangers, living lives of comfortably solipsistic anomie in lavishly appointed “sarcophagi” that they abandon early each morning for work in the “metal-and-glass towers that hold our offices.”
Esther Allen, in her preface to As You Were Saying, presents the twinned stories as a form of “cultural engagement,” though in Claudel’s case it’s more a dialogue des sourds than a conversation, so note-perfect is his rendition of the old songs of Franco-American hostility. The Bosnian-born, Chicago-based Aleksandar Hemon, whose story “Good Living” is twinned with Claudel’s, takes the transcultural theme more seriously.
Hemon’s narrator, also Bosnian and also domiciled in Chicago, is making a sort of living selling magazine subscriptions to “suburban Americans.” Because his protagonist is a new arrival, Hemon is able to combine the detached curiosity of the outsider (the salesman watches flickering television pictures through the windows of the houses on his beat) with the immigrant’s wish to emulate and assimilate. “Good Living” is the wittiest and gentlest of the stories collected here, and ends with the narrator persuading a rather careworn Catholic priest to buy a subscription to American Woodworker. “I could live here,” the narrator thinks. “I could live here forever. This is a good place for me.”
The approach of the other writers is more oblique, and they treat collaboration principally as a formal, rather than thematic, challenge. Marie Darrieussecq and Rick Moody, for instance, offer mirroring perspectives on cosmetic surgery, while the gaze of Grégoire Bouillier’s protagonist follows a young woman straight into Percival Everitt’s accompanying story. Only Camille Laurens and Robert Olen Butler solve the problem by surrendering their own voices entirely and writing à quatre mains about a young woman visiting a man in an office, who turns out to be a detective, as well as her father. The result is a kind of literary International Style, vaguely noirish, hip and blandly cosmopolitan—the idiom, perhaps, of Sartre’s nightmarish American Babel.
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