284
PARTISAN REVIEW
therefore riper for plucking by the old-line "interests," they were full
of news of real civic disaster-and yet everyone felt quite relieved.
And after it became clear that the CP was only feinting on the Viet
Nam issue, (a) for the sake of their colonial clientele in the French
Commonwealth and (b) to reassure their own party members, people
went so far as to say in print that the Communist surrender had pre–
vented civil war, for the time being!
And this brings me to my story, which Merleau-Ponty told K about
a week ago. I had hoped, in this letter, to write in some detail about
the long study of Koestler which Merleau-Ponty uses (in
Les Temps
Modernes,
October, November and January) as a pretext for examining
his own political conscience. This study has a peculiar, gruesome pathos,
the pathos of a remarkable mind and a fine sensibility desperately strug–
gling to avoid a conclusion which (although finally imposed by intellec–
tual honesty) is obviously repugnant to Merleau-Ponty, i.e., the cate–
gorical rejection of Stalinism. Why this conclusion is repugnant to Mer–
leau-Ponty, is chiefly a question for the psychoanalysts, an indiscreet
question which I do not propose to raise. But the story he told K is per–
haps of even greater significance than his own "case of conscience." It
concerns a young professor of philosophy
in
a provincial town who was
suddenly revolted by the Indo-Chinese affair. This man had never en–
gaged in political (i.e., partisan) activity, but he had been involved in
the Resistance and he felt that the war against Viet Nam was a travesty
on the ideals for which he had risked his life. He was particularly dis–
turbed at the absence of any reaction on the part of the organized groups
in his little town: the political parties and press either behaved ignobly
or kept silent. Finally, the young professor decided that he would organ–
ize a protest meeting. He organized his meeting and then found that no
one in town would lend him a hall for it. After trudging all over town,
he discovered that the only place in which he could hold his meeting
was the local
permanence
of the Communist Party, although the latter
was, at that time, unwilling to participate in the event. Merleau-Ponty,
I think, told this story in order to show that, whatever its faults, the
CP was the only progressive force that did not abdicate entirely
in
the
face of reality. But of course this viewpoint begs the question, which is
whether the CP in France or elsewhere can in fact be considered "pro–
gressive."
If
one ends, as I think Merleau-Ponty finally has, by answering
that question in the negative, then the story becomes a parable
of
the
equivoque
which has tragically perverted almost every pure and liber–
tarian impulse in France since the Russian revolution.
Breton's riot in the Sorbonne shows that there are some such
im–
pulses which have neither ended up in the
permanence
of the CP, nor
been crushed by events. But Breton, of course, has no political role in
France today.
CELIA
SooP
