WRITERS AND DEFEAT
123
One turns with relief to that arch-priest of rational detachment,
ndre Gide, who published two new installments from his journal in the
.R.F. before it grew too reactionary for him. His comments have their
athos too, but it springs from integrity, not corruption. Some charac–
ristic ones:
"If
I sense unlimited potentialities of acceptance within me,
is because they do not in any way involve the essential being. Thought
uns far worse dangers in allowing itself to be dominated by hate. As for
estricting my comforts, my pleasures, I am ready. To tell the truth, my
ging body has little use for them. Perhaps things would not be the same
I were twenty, and I think that young people are more to he pitied
day than old men." (One younger man's comment on the situation, in
editorial in
Esprit,
runs: "The war is lost. It remains for youth to
ring to fruition the greatest revolution of modern times." More inten–
.onal ambiguity?)
"If,
as is to he feared," Gide continues, "freedom of
ought, or at least freedom to express thought, is denied us tomorrow, I
all try to persuade myself that art and even thought will lose less thereby
an in an excess ofliherty.... We are entering a period in which liberal–
will become the most suspect and the least practicable of virtues. But
am trying to persuade myself that it is in non-liberal epochs that the
ee spirit attains its highest excellence." The uneasiness of this stoicism
more apparent in a blistering attack of his on Chardonne, which ap–
red in the
Figaro.
In it he characterizes Chardonne by words appro-
riate to ·the entire. group I have been discussing: "In the crucible of this
ind everything gets melted down, mixed up, volatilized, muddled and
st. Thanks to this he attains without difficulty
(non dolet)
a state of
perior ataraxia. ... Thanks to him, we become fully aware of ourselves.
he delights in his own vagueness he describes it to us so well that he
es us wish, more energetically and deliberately, to get out of it. Before
fluidity, his inconsistency, (if I may judge from myself) we feel more
ly our own firmness, and, before so many hazy acquiescences, our
stancy."
The Gide-Chardonne battle is only one aspect of a further develop·
t in French literary journalism under the New Order, a development
t is also very close to home. Scarcely a month had elapsed after the
ieg when certain French writers of fascist propensities began to
part of the blame for the disaster on the main literary trends of the
t-Proust era, calling them amoral, over-refined, destructive and other
jectives heard over here recently from people who ought to know better.
e leaders of this attack, which, under the slogan 'Les Mauvais Maitres',
ed well on into 1941, were Camille Mauclair, an old art- and Mussolini–
cier, Henry Bordeaux, a best-selling novelist and Academician, and
ri Massis, editor of the
Revue Universelle,
who distinguished himself
e years ago by initiating a mock trial of Gide before a 'court' of intel-
uals to clear up the question of his alleged dangerous influence on
ncb youth (Gide won hands down) . The movement gained some support
bigger men ,such as Claude}, who reproved the 'barrenness, lack of
