394
PARTISAN REVIEW
Literature has never been more alive . Never has so much been
written and printed, in France and in all civilized countries .
Why then do we keep hearing that our culture is in danger?
By a mixture offate, chance, and calculation, the First Interna–
tional Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture met in the very
storm's eye of the thirties. The man who spoke the opening words
was Andre Gide. His slightly oriental face wore the patina of a half–
century of literary history. During the 1890s he had belonged to the
group that listened to Mallarme test the secrets and silences of
poetry on Tuesday evenings. His novel about gratuitous murder
and the rewards of being an imposter,
Les Caves du Vatican (1914),
had inspired the young devotees of dada and surrealism in the twen–
ties; this same novel was now being revived in installments in
L'Humanite.
He had publicly proclaimed and defended his homosex–
uality in the twenties. For most listeners Gide, now sixty-six, had
turned communist . His bourgeois public considered him a dirty old
man all over again.
At the table with Gide sat Barbusse, pacifist and leftist hero
since his novel
Under Fire
(1917); Malraux, already a legend at thirty–
four with his fourth novel,
Days oj Wrath,
just out; and Aragon, con–
vert from surrealism to militant communism and editor of the
monthly,
Commune.
After Gide's short welcome, telegrams of greeting
and encouragement were read from Romain Rolland, hero of the
pacifist left, and Maxim Gorki, both in Moscow.
The first speaker was a stooped but prickly Englishman, who
talked inaudibly for twenty minutes about the close connection in
England between traditions and liberties and the recent danger of
censorship. With this speech E. M. Forster entered a kind of half–
hearted political period which he later called
Two Cheers jor Democ–
racy.
There was more wistfulness than militancy in Forster's state–
ment that he would perhaps be a communist "if I was [sic
1
a younger
and braver man, for in communism I can see hope." He was fol–
lowed by a heavyweight polemicist who brought the proceedings to
life again with an impassioned simplification of Western history and
by asking in effect for a division of the house. Julien Benda, author
of
The Treason oj the Intellectuals
(1927), rapped out a stinging speech
affirming that, in the West, intellectual activity has traditionally
stood apart from material and economic forces and inviting his com–
munist colleagues to answer the question: "Does Lenin form a con–
tinuity with Montaigne, or is there a fracture?" Benda had, in fact,
been mousetrapped. Several speakers had their answers ready:
