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PARTISAN REVIEW
which Leiris has chosen to break with the usual rules of literature and
tell everything. Naturally, therefore, it is something of an unpleasant
book, with Leiris telling all kinds of disquieting things about him–
self, including the disappointing size of his penis. While Abel dis–
likes the book, Kaplan defends it. "You mustn't look at Leiris' book as
a piece of 'literature,' in the old sense," he says. "This is a new
conception of literature altogether-one on which, if I may say so,
I've been working myself for some time: Literature as a Scandal."
The theme is launched, and in a moment both of them are carrying
literary criticism into the stratosphere of abstraction. This is Abel's
usual atmosphere, where he draws his life's breath, but tonight
Kaplan goes soaring with him into the blue, out of that great suave
courtesy of his, and a little too with that same
disponibilite
with
which he goes slumming in the Arab hashish joints in Paris.
The word "scandal" sticks unaccountably in my mind, as,
shut out from the conversation, I let my eyes wander around the
restaurant and catch a glimpse of two American youths across the
room, one of whom had been pointed out to me a few days
earlier as the original love-object and hero of a lush novel that
created a mild stir in America a year or so ago. The couple are
"married," the degree of their domestic intimacy is a standing
joke among some people on the Left Bank, and now the two of
them, sitting side by side against the wall, have the demure and
courting air of a man with his date. The word "scandal" suddenly
comes to life, and I snap my ear back on the conversation at our table.
Kaplan and Abel are higher up in the stratosphere than ever,
talking about the problem of communication and silence, authenticity
and banality. "All of modem art," Kaplan says, "is an immense effort
to escape from the museum-if you wish, even to destroy the museum.
Literature offers us something comparable in the idea of the scandal
-a destruction of literature in the usual belletristic sense. For Leiris,
literature is like a bullfight, in which the writer risks himself in the
arena before the eyes of the crowd. He chooses to tell things that used
to be passed over in silence. He may even incriminate himself."
Suddenly I realize that here, precisely in Leiris' sense, there
is a scandal across the room, though Kaplan does not see it, the
same scandal that has been
all
around me since I arrived, and that
perhaps I ought to put pen to paper, against my own wishes, to
