106
PARTISAN REVIEW
.A~dre
Breton, Albert_ Paraz,
Hen~i P~stou~eau,
and Benjamin Peret, together
with
~ transl~te~
section of lgnaz10
S1~one
s
School for Dictators,
a revealing
selectiOn of Citations from letters replymg to the original Rivera-Breton mani–
festo (see the Fall ?umber of PARTISAN REVIEW), of qualified refusal from
such as Roger Martm du Gard, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Rivet, Michel Leiris,
Robert Ganzo, and Jean Painleve, of adhesion from such as Jef Last, Francis
Vian, Molins, Herbert Read, Victor Serge, .Andre Marchand, Paul Benichous,
and J. F. Chabrun-and the usual rubrics of books, theatre, and cinema,
plus several other manifestos.-:.cte packs into its eight
Nation-size
small-type
pages a surprising amount of thought and information, the impact of whose
delivery can hardly fail to have repercussions.
The purely politically minded might cavil somewhat at a violence of
language, a personality of invective, that smack a trifle of literary ultra–
leftism; but those who have been nauseated by the dead-level Stalinization
of French liberals, the careerist degeneration of such once brilliant writers as
.Aragon, and the general sickliness of the whole politico-artistic situation in
France, will perhaps understand and sympathize with the desire of
C/e'
s
directors to have its opening blast utterly unequivocal and violently purifica–
tive.
To realize that some such organization as the FI.ARI is badly needed _in
France to provide a rallying-point for avant-garde artists and intellectuals
who have a genuine belief in the necessity and relative immediacy of revo–
lution, one need only compare FI.ARI's position with that taken by the
literary stooges of the official "revolutionary" party: certainly characteristic
and revelatory islA
Conspiration,
the new book by Paul Nizan, a Communist
Party functionary and editor of the international-news page in that party's
"non-political" daily,
Ce Soir-a
book which provides the "Communist"
quotation· of the season: "Revolution is all very well, but it's just pure
romanticism." .After this, it will not surprise that
La Conspiration
was award–
ed the Prix Inter-.Allie.
The other literary prizes, just announced, went as might be expected to
the undistinguished authors of undistinguished books: the Goncourt to
White-Russian refugee Henri Troyat's
L'
Araigne;
the Femina-Vie Heureuse
to Felix de Chazournes's "sweet"
Caroline;
the Renaudot to
Paris-Soir
Liter–
ary Columnist Pierre-Jean Launay's
Leonie Ia Bienheureuse.
.All of which
makes as little difference in the interstellar spaces as do the U.S. Pulitzers;
but produces just as much log-rolling, publishers'-ad excitement, and news–
paper publicity. The choices are, one supposes, news; in any case they will
surely provide interesting documentation to post-revolutionary cultural his–
torians.
The entire Paris concert scene has been much modified by the extensive
and continuing influx of German, largely Jewish, refugees. Their Germanic
tendency to turn concert-halls into temples wherein the faithful, burying
their faces in their hands, breathe deeply in rhythm, has irritated the French,
who like to listen to music with their eyes open and their pores shut, into
exasperated wriggling and programme-rattling.. Less frivolously, this migra–
tion has produced ali interesting rivalry between the German conductors
Furtwangler and Scherchen. Furtwangler, a sort of ambassador of German
music, and about the last top-flight conductor the Nazis have left, gave at
the Salle Pleyel, with seats running up to
1
50
francs, a series of classicized
