258
PARTISAN REVIEW
Absence abominable absinthe de la guerre
N'en es-tu pas encore amerement grisee
Nos jambes se melaient t'en souviens-tu naguere
Et je savais pour toi ce que ton corps faisait
(As with so much of Aragon's poetry, what begins as a good phrase
trails off into merely ordinary verse.) And always there is the forlorn
dream of the return to the old life, whose symbol is some dull but
heimisch
banality out of the past (crossword puzzles in Aragon's case).
In this sense Cowley is correct when he asserts that Aragon "spoke" for
the soldiers-but on a level of awareness no higher than their own.
The later, "patriotic" Aragon of the Resistance is certainly not the
same as the defeatist and personal Aragon of the mobilization and de–
feat. It is the poetry of the earlier Aragon, however, that is read, while
it is the public role of the later that is acclaimed. The poetry of the
"patriotic" Aragon is tumescent and
tast~less
and-with superior chic–
ness-it is guilty of the same "mechanical phrases" and "imbecile hi-de–
ho heard once too often on the radio" that he condemned in his defeatist
verse.
What, after all, is the real character of Aragon's patriotism? One
remains convinced of his willingness to drop it-as he dropped it during'
the defeatist period-at a word from Moscow. One is surely not dealing
here with traditional loyalty to
patrie,
an emotion acknowledging sub–
servience to nothing else.
If
patriotism is the question, then Aragon
is, like all Stalinists, a Russian patriot. His country, France, is in the
last analysis merely the locale of his private life and pleasures. And it is
in this sense only that Aragon is a "patriot." In the army and in the
Resistance, Aragon is the celebrant of civilian life. It is not the mockery
of justice-what one would think the proper concern of the spokesman
of an oppressed nation-but the denial of pleasure that brings him to
his highest pitch of eloquence:
Whether at sunset or at dawn
The skies are colorless and wan
Spring dies among the flower stalls
Bright Paris of my youth, farewell
I am monarch of my sorrows still
We are all, in this sense, patriots of the places of our enjoyment. Aragon's
dishonesty consists in the attempt to inflate emotions essentially private
in their scope into a national and political cause.
Some sedentary intellectuals in England and the United States,
sensitive to the injunction to "do something!" and tired at last of the
isolation of the avant-garde, have, by transference of their own unful–
filled longings, elevated Aragon to the post of bardic captain of his
people. Malcolm Cowley writes in his introduction: "The poet here
[in England and the United States], whether soldier or civilian, usualiy
