PARIS LETTER
73
Nadeau on Surrealism, which almost caused a riot in the hall and ended
with Nadeau gravely placing a dunce-cap on the table and walking out.
Very much in the Dada tradition.
The extraordinary concentration of French cultural life in Paris
(and within Paris, in certain quarters, certain cafes, etc.) is stimulating
and, in a multitude of ways, extremely practical. Since all or almost
all the young writers are variously involved with each other in a thou–
sand different projects-reviews, weeklies, radio programs, book-puOlish–
ing, films-it is useful for them to know that if they go to a given cafe
· at a given hour they are bound to meet almost all the people they may
need to see. At the same time, of course, they exchange ideas and gene–
rally bedevil each other, as writers should.
There are drawbacks to this system, however, and the most obvious
is the hypertrophy of a certain coterie spirit, with the resultant warping
of criticism and critical ideas. Every dramatic critic in Paris wrote a
long and embarrassed account of Simone de Beauvoir's tragedy,
Les
Bouches inutiles,
stressing the nobility of its language and the profundity
of its idea. Some were not even embarrassed; they simply praised, shame–
lessly. Yet the play was so foolishly written and so badly staged that the
audience howled at it, "amused and furious," as Sartre would say,
throughout the entire performance I saw. This mea.ns, I'm afraid, that
existentialism, i.e. Sartre's gang, has "seized power" in the French literary
world. We, with our writers spread over a continent, may find it difficult
to realize how real and efficient is this power: but the fact is that it
controls the mechanisms-the publishing houses, the literary weeklies,
the theatre-of that still flourishing industry, France's greatest
article
de Paris,
culture.
Sartre's seizure of power has not been without incidence upon his
own work and especially upon his new review, which seems to have
contracted a number of unholy alliances. (The
immediate
result of this
new united front is that Sartre, who had been attacked by the Commu–
nists and the Catholics for the so-called nihilism of his philosophy, has
proclaimed a daring new doctrine of "engagement," which appears to
be nothing more nor less than the Comintern's late and unlamented
"socialist realism.")
This is a complicated question, and since both Sartre and his review
seemed destined for a long and brilliant career we shall have time to
discuss it. Let me simply express the hope that we shan't have to do
so under the general heading of the increasing Stalinization of French
intellectual life. I think not. Camus published an article, a few weeks
ago, called "Why I am not an Existentialist." The ineffable Raymond
Queneau, the most subtle and original of the living poet-novelists, con–
tinues imperturbably to publish his little masterpieces, as though to
