PARIS LETTER
497
evening in scandal, sounds terribly fake; worse, it sounds facile; but
it happens to be true, more literally so than much that I have written
in these ineffable Paris Letters. Now I sit here, in the Basque country,
and reflect that if literature is to be considered as a tauromachy there
must indeed be real danger, a danger more radical than Patrick's bloody
horns: now what, for example, have I told you about myself?
But
if there is danger, there must also be mastery. You cannot stand
stupidly and let yourself be gored. There must be grace, intention,
courage, cleverness, that supreme impudence of man who triumphs–
for a moment!-over the stupid, brutal injustice of death.... The camps
raise all our problems anew, in an almost intolerable language of pathos
and terror. The question of who we are, which turns out to be a question
of situating our lives; our freedom and responsibility as prisoners; the
political questions, shall we seek power in the camp, in the name of what,
and how shall we behave in the face of our masters? To live above the
level of the world's return to Peace is actmilly to raise these questions
at
every
instant.
That is another reason why we cannot, on pain of death,
cease our colloquy with the ghosts of Buchenwald, Dachau, and Dort–
mund.
Since beginning this letter, I have found a paper-cutter and read
part of Sartre's latest installment on "What is Literature?" After ex–
posing with a truculent and joyous
vacherie
the attitudes of his predeces–
sors, and pointing out why their methods are no longer viable, Sartre has
a deeply moving development on the torture of the resistants: "Who will
efface that Mass wherein two liberties (i.e. the victim and the tormentor)
communed in the destruction of the human? We knew that it was being
celebrated all over Paris, while we were eating, sleeping, making love."
This, for Sartre (who has written a play about possible attitudes to
physical torture) is an exemplary "extreme situation," the very type of
situation with which his generation-wherein he includes Camus, Mal–
raux, Koestler, and St. Exupery- has been centrally preoccupied. The
insight is brilliant, and these pages are brilliantly written . The resistants
who did not give in "broke the circle of Evil and reaffirmed the human,
for themselves, for us, even for their torturers.... Everything con–
spired to discourage them: so many signs around them, these faces bent
over them, this pain within them, all joined to make them believe that
they were only insects, that man was the impossible dream of roaches
and bugs and that they would awake as vermin, like everybody else.
Man was something they had to invent with their martyred flesh, with
their hunted thoughts which were already betraying them; beginning
from nothing, for nothing, in absolute gratuitousness; for it is within
the human that one can distinguish means and ends, values, preferences,
but they were still at the stage of the world's creation and they had only
