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PARTISAN REVIEW
know.
I lmow most of the poor devils the Russians put on the boat at
Taranto never get back to Russia. Something happens to them, they fall
off the deck, commit suicide, are never heard from again. But what are
the lives of 130 people-there are only 130 Russians in the camp-when
it comes to endangering the relations of the big powers?
If
you'd seen
the thousands of men dying on the battlefield that I have, you wouldn't
be upset about this handful of bloody refugees.
"Understand me, I don't like the Soviets any better than you do.
They're always making damned nuisances of themselves. Every week
they bother us with long reports against the officers of the Polish corps.
And whose desk do the reports get to?
Mine.
They claim the officers are
preventing their men from returning to Poland. The reports are com–
plete, detailed, pages of them, they mention names and places, it takes
hours of my time to investigate them. And what do I find out? That
there's not a grain-not a damned grain-of truth in them."
(The old technique, I thought, the detailed lie of the Moscow
trials.)
He had finished by working himself up into a fury against the
Russians, remembering all his personal irritations at their hands. "With
the calibre of officers they've sent down here,
if
they're typical, how
they ever stood up to the Germans I don't understand. I DON'T UN–
DERSTAND!"
But the case of the refugees stood as it was. I'd been enlightened,
nevertheless, about Yalta. Franklin D. fixed us in more ways than we
know.
5.
Writing from the focus of New York, I think that PR's last letter
from Rome may have been too optimistic about the Italian cultural situa–
tion, in its present state
if
not its promise. Not that a revaluation would be
caused by the general level of things here; but from what I've since heard
is being done in France-not a word of which got through to us in Italy.
France has always been the cultural exporter to the whole continent
(under Fascism, alas, the importation became an affair of chichi and
affectation) , and with the present closure of borders the resulting
im–
poverishment is visible everywhere. Paris is now farther from Rome than
from New York. Leonora Fini, the surrealist paintress, persuaded an
agreeable French aviator to fly in three Schiaparelli hats from Paris,
but apparently he wasn't able to bring any Parisian ideas-Existenz or
otherwise-with him. When after 20 years it was suddenly permitted
to the Italians to have ideas again, they found themselves with neither
the ·materials nor the point of departure for thought. One doesn't enter
the modern world by fiat, at a bound. And, of course, the backward
