PARIS LETTER
Literary news. I have just received a letter from an Italian
friend of mine, a well-known novelist. It begins: "Literary life is getting
paler and more precarious every day. The question is in order: 'For
whom, or rather, for what civilization are we writing?' " And it goes on:
"I am suffering from an attack of war jitters, these days. What depresses
me most is the thought not so much of the A-Bomb, the weapons, and
violent death, as of the cowardice, the informing, the famine, the uni–
versal fear, the desperate social experiments, the persecutions, the in–
tolerance, and the propaganda. These are things I know only too well,
and they make me sick to my stomach. The beauty of it is that it will
all be done in the name of human progress.
"I don't know whether war will come this summer," continues my
literary friend, "but when I see in the papers articles which make fun
of panicky bourgeois people who are withdrawing their money from the
banks, and making ready to escape by plane, motorboat or car, I, who
am not doing anything of the kind, am tempted to say that those people
are not so wrong after all. The question today is not to make a heroic
show, but rather to protect oneself from a catastrophe which, as we
have learnt just a few years ago, has a tendency to spare those who have
been able to take some protective measures. These are ugly thoughts,
I know, but after all everything happens as
if
all that History, the modern
world, and the modern State, wanted from us were our physical life. As
for our reason, our moral consent, our persuasion, who on earth cares
for them? Hence, although I might not approve of them, I certainly
do understand the people whose first reaction to the present crisis is to
run away, like frightened animals."
I shall not comment on this letter. I just give it as the latest piece
of news that has reached me from the literary world.
Then there was the remark by a French poet on his return from a
trip to Florence. "My strongest feeling there," said the poet, "was that
even
if
the city itself with all its buildings, its statues, and its paintings
were annihilated those were by no means fundamental realities, and it
would not be too difficult for man to create something just as stately
