PARIS LETTER
105
drawings of Kurt Seligman. .Though it suffers somewhat from the
highly poetick surrealiste yoqbulary, haunted by hour-glasses and
cross-bows, it is indisputably the work of a fine poet, and is in parts
reminiscent of the author's pre-surrealiste
Le Belle en Dormant,
which
contains some of the purest and most moving lyricism to be found
in a language tending to be heavily literary.
After the strangely beautiful straight surrealiste
De derriere les
fagots
of 1934, and the magnificient sheer obscene violence of the
political
]e ne mange pas de ce pain-la
mentioned above, Benjamin
Peret's latest,
Au paradis des fantomes,"
seems rather slight. Perhaps
the fact that the author had spent more time fighting against Franco
in Spain than in writing poetry may explain this. Yet even in so small
a frame, the Peret qualities of impatient power and sardonic anger
prove him an undiminishing force, and make it strange that he is not
better known in America.
About the luxuriously mounted
Les mains libres
of the poet
Paul Eluard and the photographer Man Ray, the less said the better.
One is bidden to admire particularly the fact that so good a draughts–
man should deliberately choose to draw so cheesily; and as for the
accompanying poems, the famous Eluardian quality of delicacy
becomes sheer vol-au-vent. But Eluard's more recent
Cours naturel
again reaches his high standard : sensitive lithe delicate poems of a
perfect professional mastery. The only cavil is that, though they touch
on some very grave subjects, their content is nearly as delicate as their
technique. It has been a shock that Eluard's sense of expediency has
made so brilliant a poet prefer continuation of his connection with the
Stalinist
Commune
to signing the FIARI manifesto.
Politically France is tense. The ten billion francs spent on mobili–
zation, anti-aircraft lighting, and similar measures for scaring the
civil population into accepting the cynical sell-out of Czechoslovakia
arranged last November, might have been largely saved: nobody but
the G.Q.G., the Stalinists and the DelaRoque wing of the fascists
wanted to fight anyway. Under the probable parliamentary cover of
a Radical-Right alliance, a fierce intensification of employers' attacks
upon the fragmentary vestiges of the 1936 workers' gains is probable.
Franc-scares and further war-scares, with appeals to self-sacrificing
patriotism, will probably be used to try to keep the government func–
tionaries from getting their 10% November increase. But no series of
however fancy formulre can forever restrain the slowly mounting anger
of the militant French proletariat: at first the Popular Front's skilful
stealing back of the gains of the May-June 1936 strikes and now
Daladier-la-Guerre's franker methods to the same end. It is far from
excluded that the so-often betrayed workers, again summoning their
strength and militancy, will reply to the patronal attack with a great
strike-wave. In any case, late autumn in Paris bids fair to be consider–
ably brisker than the summer.
Paris, 7 October 1938.
SEAN
NIALL
