Paris Letter
D
EAR
P.R.,
I've been trying to get H.J.K.
*
to write this letter for a week now,
but he has all sorts of bureaucratic aches and pains, Official Functions,
Categorical Instructions, plus a conscience that doth etcetera, so that
there is nothing for it but to write the thing myself. I have a notion,
in any case, that you'll lose nothing in the exchange. What with Orwell,
Koestler, that fellow in Rome, and K, you've been altogether too much
involved in correspondence with Great Men, lately; and everybody
knows that the Greater the Man the more monstrous his error, in these
curious times of ours.
-
K, for example, has been misled into reading Hegel, instead of
taking me out evenings, and he pretends to be an enemy of the
serious.
But the fact remains that he lives in terror of the Communists, who
represent France's awful
souci du lendemain;
and he grows solemn at
the drop of a
bonnet rouge.
I, on the other hand, am an ex-schoolteacher,
and the first point I would hammer into your collective head is that one
cannot be solemn and understand France, in the spring of 1947. "Aye,
aye," says K , and cracks his face trying to simulate laughter. Then he
whisks a copy of
L'Humanite
out of his pocket and goes gloomily off
to read it in the W.C.
And yet, for a housewife and materfamilias like me, reading
L'Hu–
manite
can be a pure and simple pleasure. This was not a gay winter,
in Paris, but there was always a headline by Cachin or an article by
Courtade, to buck us up. When the butcher shops were empty, the
headlines cried:
MEAT FOR OUR CHILDREN!! DEATH TO THE PROFITEERS!!
When power was turned off, two full days each week, it was:
ELECTRICITY
FOR THE woRKERs' HOMES!
And of course there were the regular head–
lines, cast in unmovable type:
UP WITH WAGES! DOWN WITH PRICES!
Meanwhile, the Communist ministers countersigned the electricity cuts
and the freezing of wages, and refused-as did the other parties-to
take action against the peasants who were speculating on inflation and
refusing to send their cattle to market. (The lines are now pretty well
drawn in the cities; future electoral battles will be fought in the rural
*
H.
J.
Kaplan, whose wife- Celia Scop-is writing this letter.
