492
PARTISAN REVIEW
thyroid disturbance, when his hard and stocky body suddenly swells with
uneasy flesh. He had been batting around for two nights without sleep,
he was-pale, flabby, unshaven, and a little drunk. But very earnest. "It's
that woman who's a menace," he said.
"Je suis contre.
Besides, flaying's
too good for her after her article about Bataille, in the
Cahiers du Sud."
Here, for a moment, I stop. There is indeed something monstrous in
the world's return to Peace: going back to our games, after what we
have seen. But if that is monstrous, this is dangerous: literature conceived
as a bullfight, as Michel Leiris says. I am telling a true story, naming
real names. The very excitement I feel is suspect. Nevertheless, if litera–
ture is to be conceived as a bullfight, there must be real danger. Patrick,
for one, can gore me, for he calls forth my admiration and my despair.
Built like a bull, with an enormous, beautiful head on a massive neck,
when he says "Kaplan?
Je suis contre!"
my heart sinks and I long for the
courage to brain him. Even when he says
je suis pour
I am enraged
and humiliated at my gratitude. But braining him would not help,
really, for Patrick is obviously and persistently somebody, and there's
no way of doing away with that. An American citizen by some freak of
birth, he is the most gifted young poet I know in France ; and he seems
wonderfully expert at living his divided life, as an International Civil
Servant on one hand, and as a strange and malefic youth on the other.
And because he belongs so peremptorily to a secret aristocracy, Patrick
goes off-handedly about Paris and berates innocent, well-meaning people
who are straightway stricken dumb, paralyzed, suddenly aware that they
are not so innocent as they had supposed.
On our way to my apartment, where Patrick was to shave, I told
him that we could not, on pain of death, forget the ghosts of Dachau,
Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Matthausen. Malaparte's
Kaputt
was one
way-a characteristically slick and abject way-of forgetting them.
Malaparte lied about them, jerked facile tears over them, transformed
them into familar and meretricious props. The world returns to Peace
as man represses his apprehension of death; whores were useful on both
occasions.... Patrick was not listening, or so it seemed: in his aura
of spiritual pornography, alcohol, drugs, sexual experiments, the whole
mysterious business of "extending the limits of possibility" and staking
one's life in the process (which, by now, seemed so desperately outmoded
in France, except precisely for those who really staked their lives ),
such considerations were inevitably paltry. I remembered the Italian
boy who was torn to death by the S.S. dogs in Matthausen. From the
stake to which he was bound, as the dogs began to tear at his meager
flesh, he filled the entire camp with his cries:
"Pieta, signor comman–
dante, pieta!"
Is there no relation between that cry and the raucous
scream of Artaud?
At my place, Patrick shaved, emerged from the bathroom with
