Paris Letter
People change; Paris never. After twelve years' absence, the
former fact gratifies as much as the latter. For the fairy duchesses
of the"Pare Monceau, tearfully ruined, have hastened to the equally
secure
if
less amorous patronage of the WPA; the sensitive well–
dressed young men, their unfinished novels still unfinished, have sailed
home to America to help in Dad's business; and, save for the hardy
perennials (Nina Hamnett standing up in the select to accuse Robert
McAlmon of being too intellectual) and the melancholy flocks of
insufficiently political political refugees, the cafes contain principally
working professionals. Working, what is more, double shift, for
France has no WPA Writers' and Painters' projects, and they
must both work at their work and work for their livings: of four
practising poets taken at random, one binds books, one proofreads,
one lectures, one draws cartoons-and
everybody
writes articles. La
Boheme is long since dead; and the bogus Bohemia based on monthly
allowances, duly wept, sung, and only half regretted, has in its tum
passed into history, its place taken by a sterner quotidian reality pro–
ductive in French artists of a remarkably intense, if not alas always
soundly Marxian, preoccupation with economics and politics. And
Paris is the pleasanter for it.
Such the basic situation; but artistic Paris only begins to emerge
from the summer doldrums. Galleries reopen quietly with a few paid
shows ·by various ambassador's and minister's darlings; the - new
utumn books have not yet begun to appear; and even the Revolution,
hich has been, like everybody else,
en vacances,
camping in the more
comfortable and exploited parts of Normandie, (on the pretext,
ne supposes, of 'turning to the peasantry') has only just re-entered.
ut of a dead level of apathy and inactivity there rose during the
er only the desperate G. P. U. kidnapping in the heart of Paris
f
Rudolf Klement (of the secretariat of the Fourth International)
hose headless and legless trunk was found floating in the Seine at
eulan, and that International's nevertheless successful First World
onference.
The launching, by Andre Breton and Diego Rivera, of the
IARI (Federation Intemationale de 1'
Art
Revolutionnaire Inde–
dant) has at last provided a rallying-point for those artists who
ve of late grown more and more uncomfortable in the increasingly
elly Stalinist ambience, especially since Nizan's sharp attack inC
om–
une
on Friedmann's intendedly panegyric
De Ia ,rainte Russie
a
l'U.
.
S.
S.-a symptomatic and monitory whip-crack of an Inquisitional
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