LETTERS FROM PARIS
451
one of the prizes (he didn't), and Nadeau decided to nip this in the
bud by a vicious attack in
Combat.
Bazin replied in
Le canard enchaine,
the Parisian satirical weekly-praising Nadeau for his "inspired com–
mentary" on Rimbaud's
La chasse spirituelle
(a fake Rimbaud text at
which, last year, Nadeau had bitten hook, line, and sinker), and nom–
inating Nadeau for a non-existent
Prix Modique
to
be
awarded to critics
with no special gifts whatsoever. The pay-off came when Bazin's pub–
lisher bought an ad in
Combat
that forced out Nadeau's weekly column.
The ad said, in effect : "Everybody has read the brilliant and im–
portant article of Maurice Nadeau on Herve Bazin. Now read Bazin's
novels."
No complaint was registered from any quarter, however (except
perhaps from the Stalinists, though I haven't been reading their pub–
lications regularly), when the city of Paris gave its annual literary
prize to Jean Paulhan. Each year Paris rotates the award to go to a
different literary genre ; this year was an essayist's turn and Paulhan
was voted
with
almost no opposition. Little known to the average French
reader, Jean Paulhan is even less well known outside of France; but
he is certainly one of the most influential living French men of letters.
He took over the editorship of the
Mouvelle revue
lran~aise
after the
death of Jacques Riviere, he now edits the
Cahiers de la Pleiade,
and
he is, besides, the chief literary adviser of Gallimard-the
eminence
grise
of modem French literature, as the French papers always call
him. He has written comparatively little, and his most important work,
L es Ileurs de T arbes,
was published in 1941.
This book is an attack-though attack is too strong a word for
Paulhan's critical manner--on what Paulhan calls the "Terror"; this is
the critical theory that considers the conventions of language (or
rhetoric) to exercise a mysterious power over writers, rendering them
incapable of expressing new ideas or new experiences. Most of French
criticism from the Romantics on has been dominated by this notion,
as Paulhan proves by copious quotations (and not only French criticism,
one might add); but Paulhan shows how little sense this theory makes
when examined on its own terms rather than accepted as an assumption
so evident that it doesn't have
to
be
argued about. So far as Paulhan
goes his book is highly effective, though the truth is that he doesn't go
very far--or very deep. Paulhan's manner tends to
be
somewhat pixyish;
he circles around his problems, delicately sticking pins into other peo–
ple's balloons but hardly doing much else. Stylistically, he affects the
sophisticated-innocent air, naively asking just the right questions with
a modest air of sincere wonderment-the questions that are sure to
