PARIS LETTER
477
Valery, Gide, Alain, Giraudoux, etc.; their heresy, he says, was to have
been at once writers of ideas and fundamentally disinterested in the
essential functionalism of the intelligence. He quotes from Valery: "A
man of ideas is never serious"and "we proceed by accidents, and not
by constructions." He points out for scandal the elusiveness ("Build a
fine house," said Gide, "you'll always find a lodger to live in it"), the
formal preoccupations, the incommunicability, the rarity and finally the
particularism, of these writers. "A true thought lasts only a moment,"
Valery once said, "like the pleasure of lovers." Benda calls upon French
youth to rally around him, under the banner of realism, logic and
humanism.
You may wonder how existentialism-which after all involves at
its core a doctrine and a clear adhesion-----comes into the scope of Benda's
indignation. As a matter of fact, the only reference to this movement is
in a parenthesis so typical of the attacks to which Sartre and Camus
have been subjected that I am moved to quote it for you: "Let us note,
in passing, that we have here an immense victory for Germany; for,
if the Germans are beaten ... militarily, they have grounds for consola–
tion in remarking that they have been singularly victorious in the spiritual
field, since the masters of a whole movement of new French poetry are
admittedly Novalis and Holderlin, and those of one of our most fashion–
able philosophies are Husser! and Heidegger; as for the influence of
Nietzsche, it is actually worldwide." Benda does not go on to say, as
Stalinoid critics are prone, that Heidegger was a Nazi and therefore
Sartre is a trotskyite-bukharino-hitlerite, ripe for the stake. Chalk up at
least one point for Benda, who in fact makes no further reference to
existentialism in his article. (Actually, one cannot accept Sartre's con–
tention that Heidegger became a Nazi simply out of cowardice: there
is
a connection between Heidegger's
Existenzphilosophie
and his nazism:
but since this is not a
necessary
relation, i.e. since a Heidegger might
also and without philosophical inconsistency have become a revolution–
ary anti-Nazi, the point is not quite relevant to this discussion.)
Thierry Maulnier showed many years ago, before I for one had
ever heard of existentialism, that the Cartesian, rationalist and, latterly,
scientific spirit is not the only current in French literature. Montaigne,
Pascal, Racine, Proust are also French. Today in reading essays like
Camus'
Mythe de Sysyphe,
or Simone de Beauvoir's
Pyrrhus et Cineas,
I am carried beyond Heidegger's
Sein und Zeit
(which I could never
bring myself to digest in any case) to the
Lettres provinciales,
the
Wager
and certain passages of the
Essays.
Even to certain tricks of style,
like the enunciation of a general principle in paradoxical form, transi–
tion to the first person ("I" meaning "Man") followed by a historical
or mythological example. The fact is that everything in the French
tradition which passionately explores "Man's Fate," his existence con–
sidered in the light of a certain fundamental metaphysical nostalgia,
