A Suspicion of Age

...Italics mine...

...Having achieved some kind of selfdefinition in terms of work done, she seeks further to define that work and that self against the world...

...Sarraute, "farther forward," of course, means farther in...

...It is "brave" of American publishers to offer such books to a market thirsting for facility, "brave" of our reading public to submit to the pains of expenditure as well as to those of perusal, and even "brave" of the reviewers, one infers, to praise Mme...

...For Mme...

...Which accounts for the occasionally priggish tone Mme...

...Philip Toynbee, mistaken for his father by the translator's rendering of Mme...

...About Mme...

...What they see is nothing but an illusion of reality...

...Sarraute's cool "M...

...Woolf, Mme...

...Sarraute focuses her fire on those who are always finding reincarnations of the great novels of the past in the latest popular success, The Princess of Cleves in Mme...

...It is because Dostoyevsky's convention, however startling when he created it, has become superannuated, because Kafka's is unpursuable unless one is Kafka, because Proust's is distorted by his imitators, that there is room for the novels of, say, Nathalie Sanatile...

...And nothing could be more cheering and more stimulating than this thought...

...Sarraute performs a characteristic act of the creative spirit...

...Sarraute quickly replied in a letter to the Times that her notion of showing respect was to extend, not merely extoll, the achievements of her predecessors in experiment...

...In fact, as Jorge Luis Borges puts it, every writer creates his own precursors, finding in them the rough sketch for what he himself will do, ever so much more exhaustively of course...

...Toynbee," provides the right emphasis by defining as the novelist's obligation the "discovery of what is new...

...de . . . , I suppose, or A dolphe in Bonjour Tristesse: "Several months, more often several years go by, and we witness the following astonishing fact: not only the new readers of these novels, but their greatest admirers themselves, if they have the misfortune to commit the imprudence of rereading them, as soon as they pick up one of these books, have the same painful sensation that the birds which tried to pilfer Zeuxis' famous grapes must have had...

...Sarraute uses about earlier writers: They did not quite manage to see What Was To Be Done as clearly as she docs...

...Henceforth her work must modify our conception of the past as it will modify the future, and if Mme...

...Preface to The Ambassadors...

...Not to be new, but to discover the new: that is Mme...

...Sarraute's bravery we need be in no doubt, for in The Age of Suspicion she has collected four of her major pieces on the art of the novel, written between 1947-56 (before her own novels had appeared), and in them she asserts her position without equivocation: She has chosen—the choice being no virtue of her own, she modestly observes, but a necessity of her nature—to establish, or to inscribe herself, as the French wittily have it, at the root-tip of her literary culture, among those occasionally envied, often scorned and ultimately right few spirits to whom, in all its distressing obliquity, has been revealed The New...

...In the final essay, an ironism called "What Birds See," Mme...

...She shares the impulse of a Sartre turning Baudelaire into an existentialist moralist, of a Valéry transforming Stendhal and Goethe into masks for Monsieur Teste...

...The book has too many designs upon us which are fulfilled only by the later novels...

...Thus in her little book of essays, Mme...

...Sarraute succeeds in finding a kind word for Gide and even Camus...

...When, in fact, a reviewer in the London Times a couple of years ago remarked on her dismissive treatment of the novels of Joyce, of Proust and of Mrs...

...Sarraute implies, to find out what is new...

...Perhaps it was something like this: "No privilege of the teller of tales and the handler of puppets is more delightful, or has more of the suspense and the thrill of a game of difficulty breathlessly played, than just this business of looking for the unseen and the occult, in a scheme half-grasped, by the light or, so to speak, by the clinging scent of the gage already in hand...

...Yet Mme...

...Sarraute asked me about James' financial status over a decade ago, 1 think it was because she saw in him something of herself she wanted to stand by, or against...

...It will be the sign that all is for the best, that life goes on, and that we must not turn back, but strive to go farther forward...

...Among living novelists, glimmerings of her own intent arrest Mme...

...Her only unremitting dudgeon is reserved for the critics of fiction who have failed to see what the New writers are about...

...And as we might expect, the book concludes with a stirring defense pro domo: "works that shun whatever is prescribed, conventional and dead and turn toward what is free, sincere and alive will necessarily, sooner or later, become ferments of emancipation and progress...

...Not that she underrates the great explorers of old—indeed, it is because they are old that she has a chance, Mme...

...Thus its chief interest is that of watching an artist allow herself to recognize her own voice, or her own practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods...

...Sarraute herself is Russian by birth and girlhood milieu) and asked, with disarming intensity: "One thing I'd like to know about your [American] literature—was Henry James really rich...

...But then, it is because of them that she sees it at all...

...contributor, "Poetry" In 1952, not yet consecrated by the cachet of a Sartre preface, Nathalie Sarraute came smiling toward me, a squirrel-like, attractive little woman, the sort that towers under one, shook hands as we stood together in that expatriate Parisian salon (Mme...

...Sarraute's concern, obliging her to peel away the achievements of her predecessors like so many onion integuments...

...Sarraute in Ivy Compton-Burnctt and Henry Green, though the former is dismissed for being insufficiently supple in rendering our old friend "the variety of inner movements," and the latter is accused of being "English, and it is well known that reserve often incites his countrymen to adopt a tone of playful simplicity when speaking of serious matters...

...Her account of what Dostoyevsky was attempting affords a nice recital of her own penetralia: "All of these strange contortions . . . all of these disordered leapings and grimacings are the absolutely precise, outward manifestation, reproduced without indulgence or desire to please, the way the magnetic needle of a galvanometer gives amplified tracings of the minutest variations of a current, of those subtle, barely perceptible, fleeting, contradictory, evanescent movements, faint tremblings, ghosts of timid appeals and recoils, pale shadows that flit by, whose unceasing play constitutes the invisible woof of all human relationships and the very substance of our lives...

...Quite obviously, one day in the near future, this technique, along with all the others, will seem incapable of describing anything but appearances...

...No writer in recent years has declared himself more firmly on the side of the angels than has Mme...

...Sarraute, and though her admirable French prose and her interesting mind make the alignment not entirely a matter of assertion, The Age of Suspicion is far less effective than her own novels in establishing her claim...

...Sarraute's three translated novels somehow ransoms all the work involved in weeding it out...

...Today even the New Yorker has consecrated her success ("spooky, enjoyable prose"), and the lady reviewers have assured us that the excellence of Mme...