PARIS LETTER
28]
streets in the service of the ruling bourgeoisie. "And now that new powers
have been installed, in the place of the dethroned bourgeois, this fero–
cious remark applies rather well to a regime where scandals are
managed
so much more cleverly and productively than the collectivized economy."
K was right about keeping away from politics. I see my space
running out and I am painfully aware that I have said nothing about
what is going on in this wonderful city where,
par tete de pipe,
more
paint is being applied to canvas, more words to paper, more music
to
eardrums, than anywhere else in the world. I have before me a notice
appearing in
Les Lettres
fran~aises,
wherein a lonely lady requests the
company of a cultivated gentleman, about fifty years old, and adds:
"existentialists please abstain." Last week, Andre Breton and a group of
followers crashed the gate at the Sorbonne, of all places, where
le triste
Tristan Tzara was delivering a lecture on Surrealism and the Post-War.
The lecture degenerated into a riot when Breton attempted to interrupt
and finally the faithful went off to hold a counterdemonstration in a
cafe on the Boul' Mich. Everybody's in agreement on Cocteau's new
play: it's awful. Jean-Paul Sartre is working on a film, to be called
Les jeux sont faits,
after which we expect him to turn his attention to
atomic energy (at least). The strange poet, Jean Genet, is presenting
his first play to the public next wek,
chez
Jouvet. One of the great
literary successes of the winter was a novel by an American named
Vernon Sullivan,
I'll Spit on Your Graves,
which after having been
rejected by American publishers was translated from manuscript by
Boris Vian. It's wildly obscene. Jean Wahl has been running an extremely
interesting
College philosophique,
which has attracted great crowds to
discussions of interiority and exteriority, the ontological basis of freedom,
etc. Vlaminck, who seems to be doing remarkable new work, is never–
theless in the doghouse for having called Picasso a
meteque
and publicly
yearned for the good old days of Petain. There's no end to the things
I'd like to tell you about, but the fact is that I can't get started, my mind
keeps turning back to the political
malaise.
No, one must not be solemn about it, but it climbs all over one
nevertheless. It is quite inescapable, in Paris today. About six weeks
ago, the newspapers went on strike (a perfectly absurd strike, and
therefore as symbolic as the story I am going to tell) and for the first
few days everyone felt the better for it. But after a week or so without
newspapers, people began talking about army units moving in on the
capital, De Gaulle in Paris, stocks of arms found here and there, the
Communists rising in the south, etc., etc. Meanwhile, there were the
scandals unresolved and whispered about. There was the war in Indo–
China, about which there had been scandalously little news in any case.
When the newspapers finally appeared, much weakened financially and
