PARIS LETTER
A QUESTION OF IDENTITY
The American student colony in Paris
is
a social phenomenon
so amorphous as to at once demand and defy the generality. One's far
from being in the position of finding not enough to say-one finds
far too much, and everything one finds is contradictory. What one
wants to know, at bottom, is what
they
came to find : to which question
there are-at least-as many answers as there are faces at the cafe tables.
The assumed common denominator, which is their military exper–
ience, does not shed on this question as much light as one might hope.
For one thing, it becomes impossible, the moment one thinks about it,
to predicate the existence of a
common
experience. The moment one
thinks about it, it becomes apparent that there is no such thing. That
experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair is the prin–
cipal truth, perhaps, to which the colony under discussion bears wit–
ness-though the aggressively unreadable face which they, collectively,
present also suggests the more disturbing possibility that experience may
perfectly well be meaningless. This loaded speculation aside, it is cer–
tainly true that whatever this experience has done to them, or for
them, whatever the effect has been, is, or will be, is a question to which
no one has yet given any strikingly coherent answer. Military experience
does not, furthermore, necessarily mean experience of battle, so that
the student colony's common denominator reduces itself to nothing more
than the fact that all of its members have spent some time in uniform.
This
is
the common denominator of their entire generation, of which
the majority is not to be found in Paris, or, for that matter, in Europe.
One is at the outset, therefore, forbidden to assume that the fact of
having surrendered to the necessary anonymity of uniform, or of hav–
ing undergone the shock of battle, was enough to occasion this flight
from home. The best that one can do by way of uniting these so dis–
parate identities is simply to accept, without comment, the fact of their
military experience, without questioning it ,c:;xtent; and, further, to
suggest that they form, by virtue of cl{ei presence here, a somewhat
unexpected minority. Unlike the majority of their fellows, who were
simply glad to get back home, these have elected to tarry in the Old
