528
PARTISAN REVIEW
fiction, but like one of those dreams in which dead friends, with
their old crumpled smiles and grunts, their
themes,
meet you turning
a corner.
About Valery, Mallarme or Gide you may pluck the same
berry from a dozen different vines. An occasion is not recorded by a
singular guest of some peculiar stenographic energy, an observant
dilettante with no other literary occupation to fill
his
time; no,
breaking up at midnight,
everyone
goes home, not to rest, but to
his
journal intime,
his bulging diary.
If
he is Gide he will ponder
him–
self upon the occasion,
if
he is another he will "write up" Gide.
Abundant comparisons are thus left for posterity: you may read
Roger Martin du Gard's "Notes on Andre Gide"-opening line
in
1913, At last I have met Andre Gide!-or
Gide's musings
in
his
journal on the meetings with Martin du Gard.
The information above on the first meeting of Alain and Valery
is taken from a current copy of the recently revived
La Nouvelle
NRF.
At the beginning, M. Mondor informs us that this same event,
this "dejeuner chez Laperouse," was committed to print by
Alain
himself and appeared in the
old
NRF in 1939. M. Mondor, robust
meeter and recorder, has also written on the first meeting of Valery
and Claudel and even the great "premier entretien" of Mallarme
and V.alery. His document on the latter begins with the information
gleaned from the Alain conference: "Paul Valery, almost every day,
after eleven o'clock in the morning liked to rest from his work." It
is by repetition and excess that a national eccentricity is recognized.
This overloaded pantry of memory and dialogue has a genuine
literary and historical fascination- and delights of an unnameable
sort: the pleasure of frayed picture albums, where no surprise
is
expected, and still one's heart skips a beat as he looks yet another
time at the old faces, the eyes squinting in the sunlight. In France
no hint of moderation nags this appetite. Not a word is lost in the
afternoon dreaminess, not an accent of MallarmC's swirls off to
oblivion with the pipe smoke in that apartment on the rue de Rome,
not even a silence is drowned in the punch, which, you may read
in countless sources, is brought in quietly at ten o'clock by Mme.
Mallanne and her daughter. Dining almost anywhere, the table
napkins are hardly unfolded before Valery is saying, "To read, to
write are equally odious to me." Like Napoleon's hat, these remarks
