PARIS LETTER
491
wife and child in an immense and shadowy bourgeois apartment on the
Bo1:1levard Raspail. We were at cross purposes, as usual, because he was
hoping that I could find him a job, which I doubt; and I was hoping
that he would talk about Buchenwald, where he spent the final months
of the war. We compromised for a while by talking about the Front
Humain,
a
group of ex-resistance leaders who have decided to break
out of the vicious circles of French politics but don't know where or how
to begin. For the moment, they are publishing pamphlets to remind the
world that atomic war is approaching. My young friend was having
trouble lighting his cigarette. He managed to get it into his mouth, he
managed to strike a match, but his hand shook horribly and-though
he must by now be used to being blind-he seemed unable, interminably,
to touch the cigarette with flame at the moment of inhalation. The
room was very dark, L's wife kept slipping past like a ghost, I had
been sitting deep in my armchair, feeling tired and letting the shadows
engulf me. When I excused myself belatedly for not helping, he waved
his skeletal hand and, referring no doubt at once to my excuses and to
a book I had mentioned, about Buchenwald, he murmured: "A matter
of no importance,
cela ne tire pas
a
consequence."
About nine-tenths of the survivors of Buchenwald have died since
their return to France.
II
And that is the phrase that Patrick used, a few hours later, when
I told him that Curzio Malaparte was a whore. "A matter of no im–
portance," said Patrick, "I am in favor of him." (About everyone and
everything, Patrick says:
je suis pour,
or
je suis contre.)
Our own
twentieth-century species of literary whore, interchangeable from one
regime to another, Ilya Malaparte and Curzio Ehrenburg, Konstantin
Aragon and Louis Simonov, the ink-stained darlings of the corporate
states, with the practiced bedside manner, the quick and lascivious
tongue, the discreet reek of advance-guard perfume, that most useful
aroma of half-forgotten youth and ardor. I s not literature too a matter
of no importance? Like those propositions which the instrumentalists
invidiously defined as metaphysical, when it could be demonstrated that
no measurable difference followed from their denial or their affirmation.
The war is over, we are returning to Peace, making love, making litera–
ture, under false names, about false names, and it makes no difference
whatsoever. Very well. I had told Patrick, in the cafe where--for the
first time in a year-! had bumped into him, that I was trying to
decide whether to go off to one of Claude-Edmonde Magny's "surprise
parties," as she insists on calling them, and at which the prima donna of
the evening was to be Curzio Malaparte. "You are wrong, as usual," said
Patrick. "Malaparte is very
malin,
a true saboteur, and highly regarded
by my great friend Percy Winner." Patrick was in one of his periods of
