72
PARTISAN REVIEW
I sit here and blow upon my fingers and think, as Giraudoux might
have said, that in the circle formed on a radius of ten miles from my
window more artists' fingers are being blown upon at this instant than
ever before, in any comparable area of the earth's surface. The literary,
musical, artistic activity of this city remains astounding. Since I last
wrote to you the Salon d'Automne has had a Matisse show comparable
in importance to the Picassos of last year; the Salon of Artists-Under–
Thirty offered no single "discovery" but a large number of extremely
good people (it is out of such density that the great innovators arise);
and there have been dozens of one-man shows, from Rene-Jean Clot to
Tal Coat, which have been simply crushing in bulk and in the number
of problems they raise. Sartre, after publishing two new novels (both
disappointing, after
La Nausee),
and the first two issues of his new review,
Les Temps modernes,
has flown off to New York. Simone de Beauvoir
has published a remarkable novel and presented a very bad play (which
is still running). Camus has published some essays on value,
Lettres
a
un ami allemand,
and staged his "absurd" tragedy,
Caligula.
There has
been a great flurry of excitement over the literary prizes, the weeklies
publishing stereotyped interviews with the favorites (just as we do with
boxers, on the eve of the championship match) and constantly shifting
prognostics, all based on the latest inside dope (as we do with horse–
races and divorces!). When the prize is awarded, the dailies send photo–
graphers and bright young reporters (all of whom are secretly preparing
books themselves) to immortalize the ceremony in newsprint. The new
laureate climbs upon a chair and tells the microphone how moved he is
("It was a tough fight, mom, etc.")-and the happy young man's over–
joyed publisher telephones his delighted printer and discovers that there's
no paper and no electricity for the new edition. The newspaper
Combat
has caught the spirit of these Olympic contests by sending a surrealist
poet to cover them. Henri Bosco won a prize, I can't remember which,
for his
Mas Theotime.
And Roger Vailland's
Drole de feu
(which the
Houghton Mifflin Co. is going to publish in the U.S.) was a runner-up
for the Goncourt and the Theophraste-Renaudot. For the rest, I'm
afraid there was no one involved, either as winner or candidate, whom
you would care to know. . . . At the same time, the lecture season has
produced three minor sensations: first of all, a disquisition by Sartre
on Existentialism as a New Humanism, which I hope Raymond Queneau
will describe somewhere in his next book. Sartre proved, dialectically,
that it was possible to crowd more people into the Club de Maintenant
than into the Vieux-Colombier (where Benda was lecturing, the same
evening, on the iniquity of modern literature).
It
was existentialism
a
la Dubout, with·wild-eyed students sitting in layers of three on the laps
of inanimate dowagers. The third sensation was a lecture by Maurice
