PARIS LETTER
THE NEW FRENCH SENSE OF REALITY
DEAR EDITORS,
You want to know what is going on here? Well, so do
I.
My daily work, as it happens, provides me with only too handy an
excuse for blackening my fingers, my face, and my soul with newsprint.
I ruffle up some twenty-five or thirty odd periodicals-mostly news–
papers-each day. Dozens of weeklies, reviews,
plaquettes,
and illustrated
magazines pile up at my bedside and involve themselves in my night–
mares. I gad about a great deal too, nocturnally, diurnally, and of course,
crepuscularly, developing hepatitis and a sort of perpetual contained
sub-apoplexy at cocktails, receptions, and dinner parties. Why? My work
requires that I be informed, whatever that means, but one does not
have to be excessively disenchanted to realize that most of one's duties
are also one's excuses. Do you want to know how the town has reacted
to Rene Clair's new film? I can tell you. To the eerie exhibit of Etruscan
art at the Louvre? Or the equally eerie-Byzantine-pre-electoral ma–
neuvers of the National Assembly? Just ask me. Everybody's repeating
jokes about a mythical rich bitch,
tres parisienne,
named Marie-Chantal,
and her friends Ghislaine and Gerard, whilst controversy rages over one
Minou Drouet, aged eight, whose alleged poems have been privately
printed by Julliard, as if Franc;oise Sagan weren't enough; and this has
led one of the weeklies to print a cartoon showing a mother demurely
retiring from company with her babe in arms because, she says, "It's
time for his little poem." The point is, Life Goes On. The salons are
buzzing about Anouilh's new play, and Cocteau has had his grotesque
apotheosis, delivering his inaugural speech at the Academie Fran<;:aise
in honor of Jerome Tharaud, a third-rate anti-Semitic author of travel
books. The Academic reception committee, by the way, deleted from
the speech the sulphurous name of Jean Genet, who has just been
sentenced to eight months in prison for publishing an obscure and
intolerably obscene poem (illustrated by Leonor Fini) on the adventures
of a divine little sailor in Brest.
The only mystery is why you should care. Unless it be that the
whole world is in need of excuses and Paris, despite everything, continues