10
PARTISAN REVIEW
Conrad , he was Polish , and also began to learn the language in which
he would write only after he was out of his adolescence . Conceive of
such hungry disciplines when he was a young emigrant from Warsaw
who worked in French mines and came to clarify the literature of his
new tongue by spending fourteen hours a day in the Bibliotheque
Nationale in order
to
keep warm-it was cold on the winter streets of
Paris in the years of the Depression- yes, learned his French by reading
and writing in that library with all his imagination, ambitions and
privations going into it , and took a post-graduate course in the hier–
archical elegance of the tongue by being secretary to Andre Gide for a
period , indeed met his future employer after composing a furious
letter on the spur of reading a casual piece the author had done for a
literary review.
1
In those pages, Gide had written that he sometimes wondered if
poverty might not have deepened his art. We can imagine the irony
with which he would surround so direct a sentimentality. Malaquais,
however, pulled up the barbarism and shook it in the air.
2
You ought
to get down on your knees and pray to that God you occasionally
pretendto believe in that He has let you be a comfortable bourgeois so
you can make yourart.
Such was the note ofhis letter, ahowl of ferocity
torn right out of the bitterness of trying to write at the maximum of
one 's possible talents when there was no money in the pocket and no
food in the belly . Gide wrote back to apologize . He confessed he had
not been thinking of the situation of young writers like Malaquais for
whom such words had to be naturally and justifiably intolerable , no ,
he feared he had been playing too inconsiderately with a conceit ; he
had wished to startle a number of his confreres who were over–
concerned with their sensibility and so had been cushioning
themselves too much against shock. He hoped to pose the possible
stimulations ofshock. But it had been unfeeling to ignore the situation
1Ithink it isworth printing Malaquais corrections (by way ofarecent letter)
to
afewof my biographical facts.
" The library was
h
bibliotheque Sainte-Genevihe, the only one in Paris that stayed open till 10 p .m. I'd
remain there all day long (10-12 hours), often without a meal. At closing time I'd go
to
les Hailes where, with
some luck, I'd be unloading crates of cackling poultry or frozen cabbage. Still, job or no job, Icould always grab
there an apple or a couple of carrots
to
keep the man alive ."
2 "Gide's piece, an excerpt from his
Joumal
dated March 1935 , appeared in the October issue of la
Nouvelle Revue Francaise. I think it was December when I happened to read it. Had you a chance
to
look it up
(cf. Justin O' Brien's transl. , Knopf) , I am sure you'd agree it was plain sentimental gibberish, and not in the
least ironic, idiocy was the price one had
to
pay for going along-even for a while-with the Stalinists."
