LETTERS FROM PARIS
455
I can't resist, however, pomung out once again the provincialism
to which even the best French critics are prone. Writing on the problem
of perspectives in the novel, Magny says: "Gide's critical reflection had
made
him
infinitely scrupulous on this point: with his friend Martin
du Gard he is, perhaps, the first novelist who systematically made an
effort to bring coherence into the conventions of the novcl, hitherto
so disorderly and contradictory." Just after reading these lines I had
occasion to pass the Closerie des Lilas at the intersection of Boulevard
Montparnasse and Saint-Michel; its discreetly peach-colored lights, shin–
ing through genteel Victorian curtains, reminded me that it was sup–
posed to have been Henry James's favorite restaurant in Paris. I thought
of the Master who had written
The Art of the No vel,
and wondered
what he might have said if he could have read the sentence I have just
quoted. No doubt he would have expressed himself in some elaborately
polite circumlocution, since after all a lady
is
involved; but he could
hardly have repressed feeling, as he might have put it himself, the first
fine felicity of righteous wrath.
Equally under Sartre's influence is Roger Stephane, the author of a
semi-literary, semi-political book called
Portrait de l'aventurier.
Through
a comparison of the works (and lives) of T. E. Lawrence, Andre
Malraux and a German novelist, Ernst von Salomon, Stephane tries to
define the psychology of the adventurer, the intellectual as man of
action. The adventurer, according to Stephane,
is
never totally com–
mitted to any cause he may adopt; he acts
to
affirm himself rather
than out of belief in some goal to be attained; and regardless of who
wins
the adventurer is doomed to defeat. He can only find himself at
the moment of action, when he identifies himself with others, but he
knows, only too well, the ultimate vanity of all human action. The
book, I think, touches on something crucial, though it seems to have
been ripped off far too hastily to say anything definitive. Moreover,
Stephane is so anti-Malraux that he makes a glaring misinterpreta–
tion of
Man's Fate,
whose theme is just this contrast between the
anarchist-adventurer Tchen and the good CP functionary Kyo Gisors,
who obeys orders that he knows are misguided and suicidal. Stephane, in
the interests of his thesis, writes as if Tchen represents Malraux's point
of
view.
Stephane's book, which has a preface by Sartre, has been widely
noticed in the French press, and nothing I've read discloses so well the
dilemma of
avant-garde
thinking over here. Like any Stalinist, Stephane
is suspicious of the adventurer's unwillingness to abandon himself, as an
individual, to some limited social goal; yet as an Existentialist, he feels
