256
are from
Le Creue-Coeur
and
Les
Y eux d'Elsa,
both written during
the first period of the war and oc–
cupation, before the German at–
tack in the East had terminated the
Hitler-Stalin pact.
These poems are at the same
time violently personal and dis–
piritedly defeatist. Their defeatism
has in it the same listlessness that
pervaded the Stalinist line of that
period, half-heartedly attempting
to cloak its accord with Hitler by
making formal comparisons with
the last war:
We fetch our habits after twenty
years
From oblivion's cloakroom. A.
thousand prisoners
Make the old gestures, stiff and
obsolete.
...
Malcolm Cowley's introduction
disingenuously attempts to disguise
this Stalinist-engendered defeatism
by claiming that Aragon, "during
the first months of idleness and
skepticism at the front . . . spoke
for them [the soldiers of France]
directly in their bewilderment...."
But Aragon's defeatism-on-com–
mand, crudely conceived and lacka–
daisically felt, was incapable of
providing his poetry with enough
inspiration to last even until the
next tum in the party line. He,
whose talents are primarily public
and journalistic, forlornly restricted
by his party to a marginal area of
subject matter and to a marginal
area of literary activity by the army,
turned with a vengeance to the
purely personal.
by Albert Camus
"A powerful, moving
story, telling of the
fate which befalls an
average man who
refuses to conceal his
feelings behind the
conventional preten–
sions of his fellowmen.
Written by one of
France's major living
novelists, excellently
translated.... Likely
to have much critical
attention."
-Alice Hackett,
Publishers' Weekly
Tbis is a Borzoi Book,
for sale at all bookshops at $z.oo
and published in New York by
ALFRED· A· KNOPF
