PARTISAN REVIEW
the special style and tempo of our consciousness. But it is a mis·
take to see this city also as central to the modern in the larger sense,
the sense in which we think of the contemporary as beginning in
1789. This larger and more fundamental span has not belonged to
Paris alone. It has embraced equally the United States, South
America, industrial and revolutionary China, Japan, Russia, the
whole of Europe, and every spot in the world touched by contem–
porary civilization. Despite the fall of Paris, the social, economic,
and cultural workings which define the modern epoch are active
everywhere. Even the style has not vanished with the elimination
of its capital: having been driven from the realm of art, it now
reappears in new military and propaganda techniques.
If
there is
a break between our lives and the kind of life existing before 1789,
the debasement of the Paris of that
ISO
years does not imply a
break of similar magnitude with the future. The world takes its
shape from the modern, with consciousness or without it.
The Intellectual Form of Defeat
The cultural International had a capital, Paris. Just as,
in
the 1920's too, the political International had a capital, Moscow.
It is a tragic irony of our epoch that these world centers were not
brought together until the signing of the Franco-Soviet pact, when
both were already dead. Then the two cadavers of hope embraced
farcically, with mutual suspicion, and under the mutually exclusive
provincial slogans: DEFENSE OF THE USSR and FRANCE
FOR FRENCHMEN.
The intellectuals turned out in full dress-the "proletarians,"
of course, with red rosettes and suggestive smirks-to the wedding
of this pair of radical ghosts. And offered themselves as anxious
godfathers to its unearthly issue, the Popular Front. From that
time on, it became bad luck even to recall the graves of interna–
tional culture and international socialism.
Thus it was that during the Moscow Trials we learned with
aurprise and alarm that it was here, in America! that the greatest
opposition to the criminal burlesque was being voiced.
For a hundred years poets and artists of Paris had risen as
to a personal insult against the organized sadism, lies, and bad
taste of the State, the Church, the Academy. Nowhere had the
malice of office been more promptly raked with lucid hoaxes, verses
