PARIS LETTER
403
World, among scenes and people unimaginably removed from anything
they have known. They are willing, apparently, at least for a season,
to endure the wretched Parisian plumbing, the public baths, the Paris
age, and dirt-to pursue some end, mysterious and largely inarticulate,
arbitrarily summed up in the verb, to study.
Arbitrarily, because, however hard the ex-GI is studying, it is
very difficult to believe that it was only for this reason that he traveled
so far. He is not, usually, studying anything which he couldn't study
at home, in far greater comfort. (We are limiting ourselves, for the
moment, to those people who are-more or less seriously-studying, as
opposed to those, to be considered later, who are merely gold-bricking.)
The people, for example, who are studying painting, which seems, until
one looks around, the best possible subject to be studying here, are
not studying, after all, with Picasso, or Matisse-they are studying
with professors of the same caliber as those they would have found in
the States. They are treated by these professors with the same high–
handedness, and they accept their dicta with the very same measure of
American salt. Nor can it be said that they produce canvases of any
greater interest than those to be found along Washington Square, or
in the cold-water flats of New York's lower east side. There is,
au
contraire,
more than a little truth to the contention that the east side
has a certain edge over Montparnasse, and this in spite of the justly
renowned Paris light.
If
we tentatively use-purely by virtue of his
numbers-the student painter as the nearest possible approach to a
'typical' student, we find that his motives for coming to Paris are any–
thing but clear. One is forced to suppose that it was nothing more
than the legend of Paris, not infrequently at its most vulgar and super–
ficial level. It was certainly no love for French tradition, whatever,
indeed, in his mind, that tradition may be; and, in any case, since he
is himself without a tradition, he is ill equipped to deal with the tradi–
tions of any other people. It was no love for their language, which he
doesn't, beyond the most inescapable necessities, speak; nor was it any
love for their history, his grasp of French history being yet more feeble
than his understanding of his own.
It
was no love for the monuments,
cathedrals, palaces, shrines, for which, again, nothing in his experience
prepares him, and to which, when he is not totally indifferent, he brings
only the hurried bewilderment of the tourist. It was not even any par–
ticular admiration, or sympathy for the French, or, at least, none strong
enough to bear the strain of actual contact. He may, at home, have
admired their movies, in which case, confronting the reality, he tends
to feel a little taken in. Those images created by Marcel Carne, for
