362
PARTISAN REVIEW
I have no. intention of ironizing at the expense of all these good
people whom I do not know. I'm simply warning you of my pitiless in–
nocence; if I ever get out of here alive, for example, I shall go to see the
Place des Vosges and there, instead of saying "Well, well, there is the
Place des Vosges, just where I left it," I shall probably be induced to
tell you what it looks like. And if you ever feel nostalgic for the other
kind of Paris Letter, just let me know and I'll quote you something like
this, by Gertrude Stein (from the same issue of
Fontaine)
:
after describ–
ing how she went to her apartment and found everything still there,
Gertrude exclaims:
"Mais quand meme, quand meme, quand meme, c'est un miracle.
oui c'est un miracle, Paris est toujours
Ia!"
So, if you will bear all this in mind and remember besides that for
more than two years now I've had neither time nor stomach for
Literary Observing, you will forgive me for divagating a moment or so
on the physical beauty of this city. I'm no lover of what is called
"scenery," feeling in its presence chiefly an impatient desire for its human
transmutation (into landscape, architecture, dream). I think this is
true of most city-dwellers today, with the exception of that mass which,
unable or afraid to interpret their own sensibility, must fall back on the
inherited romantic habits-for which language and fables already com–
fortably exist. Now it so happens that just before I flew to Paris I had
had occasion to travel through a good part of southern Algeria by auto–
mobile : through the
gorge~
of Palestro to the Constantine plain (the
Mitidja) down across the badlands to the northernmost oases of the
Sahara; and thence, skirting the bleached or brilliant but always ter–
rible Aures, to the coast again, and westward through the Djurdjura
mountains, home of the Kabyles. Home? What is appalling, precisely,
is that man has no home here. Nowhere. The mountains in the south,
stripped for centuries of the alluvia which covers the plains, are now
quite naked, like skeletons uncovered by a cloudburst. The soil of the
plains, so rich that a date-palm would spring from a teardrop, yields
almost nothing. The natives gather in a few oases and water the lands
of their feudal lords. The oases are green, fresh, scented, unreal in an
inhuman vastness. To the north, the Kabyles, who are of a pre-islamic
Berber stock, live perched upon the peaks of the Djurdjura, each village
fitted snugly like a bonnet over the barren rock. There's place for man
in the valley, or along the rich coastal plain, or in the wheatfields of
the Mitidja, which the Romans called Numidia. But these lands have
always belonged to the conqueror, to the Roman, the Vandal, the Arab,
the Turk, the French. Too much place. One hundred thousand Kabyles
live frigidly
in
the single commune of Michelet, where one would scarcely
assign more than two goats to a mountain. Yet in the lands of the con–
querors man is more lonely and lost than in our Middle West.
