104
PARTISAN REVIEW
the thin pure gold of France itself. Little is heard lately of the Jean
Cocteau-Christian Berard Casino save the recent publicly announced
arrest of the bird-catcher himself in an opium-raid at Toulon, with
the resultant forced resignation of the imprudent police-prefect: and
the latest Cocteau literary production was some paid reclame for a
night-club singer in
Paris-Soir.
The best book from the right is rather
from the Catholic sector: Georges Bernanos' brilliant
Les grandes
cimitieres sous la lune,
which adequately disposes of General Franco's
preposterous pretentious to being a crusader for church and civili–
zation. The surrealiste pompes funebres, on the other hand, have been
issuing regularly from the editorial mortuaries and wending their
formal way to the surrealiste cemetery where practically every major
literary talent in France has been buried.
As
for the 'thin pure gold
of France itself', it is so thin as to be practically invinsible to this par–
ticular naked eye. Certainly it is not Celine's however brilliant Jew–
baiting; the best candidate would be the detective story writer Sime–
non, whose descriptions of France and its civilization are probably
more accurate and moving than those of any more formally literary
figure.
No, there is no getting away from it: most of the first-rate literary
talents of France have been in surrealisme. But just when everyone
had given up expecting ever to see the end of surrealisme, internal
explosions permit one to observe with relief the first cracks of final
breakup appearing in its structure. 'With relief' because it had outlived
its superlatively admirable utility. Beside the official channel (or per–
haps more accurately the stone-faced tow-pathed lock-guarded canal )
of formal French letters, with its monstrous products, the homme-de–
lettres and what Ezra Pound quite justly calls 'literachoor', surrealisme
spilled out in the escape of a fructifying Meander. But it ultimately
rejoined the channel farther on, its banks began to be carefully land–
scaped by Breton, and for the young it became an 'escape' only in
the pejorative sense. For, anti-Academy in inception, it had grown
into, not imitation-Academy like the Goncourt et al., but itself a
massive anti-Academy Academy-an opposite pole, but a structural
parallel. Until recently the only cure seemed to be a success worse
than the disease: e. g., Dali, who, keeping one foot in the mo\ ement,
stepped tentatively with the other into interior decoration (the
department-store window in New York, or the couch in red wrinkled
satin forming a pair of rouged lips), long since might have expected
to hear Breton thundering his excommunication. But Breton has been
busy: in Mexico, where his lectures were pettily sabotaged by a
wretched Stalinist-Catholic bloc in the reactionary university; and
in
starting the above-mentioned FIARI, a courageous action which can–
not be too highly admired.
Of the recent surrealiste works, the best is Georges Huguet's
Une
Ecriture Lisible,
jointly written with the nineteenth century gothic
