32
PARTISAN REVIEW
grotuit
is a thing that is exclusively French, one which, in its fine nuance,
it ·is all but impossible for the non-Frenchman to comprehend. As good
an example as could be founrl is the act of Lafcadio, in
L es Caves
du
Vatican,
in pushing an unoffending feilow passenger out of the carriagr
of a moving railway train, by way, putting it crudely, of making surr
that he is capable of acting, and hence, sure that he is alive. To the
foreign ear, this may sound downright silly, if not quite mad; but as one
who has knO\'Ifn many members of the
ap·res-guerre
generation
ir~
France,
I can give the assurance that it represents-! should S;J.y, has represented,–
a very real problem.
J..es Caves du Vatic.an
was published in 1913, the
year before the War, but it would be hard to find a book that is more
after-War in spirit.
A paralysis of the will, of the will to act, is one of the most char·
acteristic stigmata of the generation from 1919 to 1929, not alone in
France, but elsewhere-in Germany, Remarque and others-and can we
say that Americans were wholly unaffected by it ?-read what Mr. Cowley
and Gertrude Stein have to say about the "lost generation"! Look over
the Dadaists, the Surrealists, down to Jacques R igaut's punctuating
revolver bullet, which in 1929 rung down the curtain on the theretofore
too talky melodrama of disillusioned youth. Almost the sole literary
representative today of this after-War defeatism is Drieu La Rochelle,
who, with his muddled ideology of a mystic "courage," his inability or
pretended inability to distinguish clearly between Communism and Fascism,
is obviously headed for the latter, the fascist camp.
At present, there is a new, revived passion for action,-for action
as a way out. The old Escapisms are dead, from a "body littrature" of
the
Corps et moi
type to M. Valery's "game" or "solemn procession of
the intellect." Even Gide's own escape, the homeopathi·c treatment of a
bad case of sensitivity with-sensitivity-will, as its creator has found,
no longer work to his own satisfaction. The only way out is the prole·
tarian collectivistic one, with that action which its attainment implies.
As to how Gide came to be a Communist, there are as ma11y opinions
as there are critics. Ehrenbourg stresses the Congo trip of some years back;
and there can be little doubt that what Gide saw in Africa, the terrible,
the horrible workings of French colonial imperialism, had its effec.t, started
him off. Gide himself will hear of no talk of "conversion," insisting that
he has not changed direction, but has gone always "straight ahead."
"The great difference is that for long 1 saw nothing ahead of me
but
empty space and the projection of my own fervor. Now, I am going
for·
ward toward something. I know that somewhere my vague desires
art
