Paris Letter
Having its birth postponed for nearly a month by the luxuriously
mounted war-scare of late September did Paris's autumn season no sort of
good: it has proved to be a rickety child, timid, cranky, and ready at the
least alarm to give up the ghost entirely. The galleries will still plan no
more than one show in advance; publishers' lists are, to put it politely, not
exactly world-shaking; and as for really striking novelties on the concert–
programmes, they can practically be counted on the fingers of one thumb.
The reason
is
not far to seek. A spectre
is
haunting France--not, alas,
the spectre of Communism, but that of internal fascism and external war.
And he must have superb soundproofing on his ivory tower who can quietly
and whole-heartedly continue the weaving of sestinas on love and landscape
amid the
tohu-bohu
of political argument and symptomatic event. No, when
writers talk together, the subjects are neither technique nor the Prix Goo–
court nor semantics, but the impact of Munich on the intellectuals, the
growth of the FIARI [See Manifesto printed in the last issue of PARTISAN
REviEw-Editors],
or the timing of the coming Ukraine grab. Discussions
about the radio, for example, tend to concern less the artistic quality of its
programmes than the severe censorship which, without even a pretense of
legality, the Daladier government imposed on November 30 duri_ng the
general strike and has not yet lifted. With the artistic and cultural world
haunted by the grimmest of political preoccupations, the arts are practised
with a visibly distrait air; and purelr cultural conversation, languid and
pallid, has a way of tapering off into broody silences. To a pedestrian medi–
tating on say the new establishment in France of concentration-camfs for
"undesirable foreigners," the sight of the Greco-vegetarian figure o Ray–
mond Duncan, suddenly sllndal-flapping from his preposterous "Akademia"
in the rue de Seine, seems literally a sheer hallucination.
Symptomatic is the change in editorial content of the weekly
Bea11x-Arts.
This paper, previously more concerned with information than with either
art-criticism or politics, and not of any marked character, suddenly at the
beginning of October launched a spectacular campaign for a "truly national
French art," with contemptibly chauvinistic pyrotechnics (signed and other–
wise) by Jean Cassou, bolstered with a series of supposedly patriotic quota–
tions from the French "great." This pompous plumping for academicism
(for of course it turns out that by a "truly national" art the
pompiers
of
Beaux-Arts
mean an art purified of the alien influences of cubism, surrealism,
abstractionism, and everything else of interest that has occurred since impres–
sionism) would be merely risible did it not remind one uncomfortably of
immediately pre-Nazi Germany. For politically conscious artists are already
sufficiently distressed by the conviction that Daladier bears a more sinister
resemblance to one Heinrich Bruning than to the Napoleon Bonaparte he
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