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charity, and unhealthy and depressing atmosphere' of some post-World
War I French wrting, with the qualification that "the good in the higher
spheres of our literature more than compensated for the bad."
If
this flurry
of recrimination is remembered at all it will be for the retorts it provoked
from Duhamel, Mauriac and Gide: statements of the real values in French
culture, words particularly heartening as coming in these days from France
herself. Duhamel: "French writers were going about the task undertaken
by their forerunners centuries ago: to describe humanity, observe events
and manners, and draw instruction from life. Nothing is more worthy of
their efforts." Mauriac, whose Catholicism is singularly free from
the
taint of reaction, published a long and eloquent statement of admiration
for writers as diverse as Bergson, Maurras, Valery, Claudel, Proust, Gide,
Montherlant, Giono and Malraux, concluding with the words: "On the
morrow of a crushing defeat, let us not be taken in by the niggardly,
envious or knavish men who presume to exact a synthetic moralism from
the writers of France. Let us not become accomplices of the impotent
creatures who are convinced, in the great silence after the cyclone, that
their turn has come at last.... Mter our disaster as before it, great books
will remain great books; and, for all their sublime principles, writers who
are nothing will not cease to belong to nothing." And Gide, as usual, crys·
tallizes the issue in a sentence: "To me it seems as absurd to incriminate
our literature with reference to our defeat as it would have been to con·
gratulate it in 1918, when we were the victors."
Such are the literary repercussions of the force that has wrought havoc
in the senior culture of Europe. A sentence comes to mind from a still
older one, that of the
Thousand Nights and A Night:
"Mine is a tale which,
were
it
engraved on the corners of the eyes with needle-gravers, were a
warning to whoso would be warned."
Note
The bulk of this article is based directly on issues of the N.R.F. and
Esprit.
The rest comes from sources included in the following list:
The Nation,
Dec. 6, 1941: 'Literature of the French Defeat.' Jan. 10, 1942:
'A Letter from France.'
The New Republic,
Dec. 22, 1941: Marc Slonim, 'French Writing Today.'
The Living Age,
April 1941: Eugene Jolas, 'Letters and Arts in Wartime
Europe.' May 1941: Henri Longa, 'The Eclipse of the French Press.'
Partisan Review,
Jan.-Feb. 1941: William Petersen, 'What Has Become
of Them?' Sept. Oct. 1941: Victor Serge,
~French
Writers, 1941.'
1941.'
Horizon
(London), Nov. 1941: 'Letter from France, II.' Part on N.R.F.
reprinted in
Poetry
(Chicago), Jan. 1942.
The New Statesman
(London), Oct. 18, 1941: 'The Continental Press.'
La
France Libre
(London), June 1941: 'Chronique de France: Culture
el
Societe.' Dec. 1941: Denise Ayme, 'Quelques Revues
Fran~aises.'
Lettres Fraru;aises
(Buenos Aires) , July and Oct. 1941: 'L'Actualite
Litteraire.'
