ROGER SHATIUCK
413
The most striking passage comes in point three. Before him sat
a vast assemblage of writers whose literary existence depended on
their establishing a name and attracting readers, and who had
erected for themselves the elaborate stage of an international con–
gress. Of all of them, Malraux was the writer who most appeared to
move through .history as if his life were a dramatic extension of his
literary work - or vice versa. Here is what he said, according to his
notes.
Individualism arises out of the fact that man finds pleasure in
looking upon himself as someone else
(un autre),
in living
biographically . The humanism we desire to create, and which
displays its earlier stages in the line of thought that connects
Voltaire to Marx, requires above all a true awareness of man, a
new stock-taking.
To be a man means, for each of us, to reduce to a minimum the actor
within him. [Etre un homme, c'est rMuire au minimum, pour chacun, sa
part de comMie.)
The only proper response to that statement by one of the principal
organizers would have been the immediate disbanding of the Con–
gress. As with Pasternak, one wonders what note of irony- or bad
faith - tinged the last sentence .
• • •
It
is high time (as Aragon snorted, quoting Boileau in support
of socialist realism) "to call a cat a cat." This was one of the most
thoroughly rigged and steamrollered assemblages ever perpetrated
on the face of Western literature in the name of culture and freedom.
That estimate does not diminish but rather amplifies its significance
as an historical and intellectual event. Only a few rightist critics and
fascist rags talked of funds from Moscow and red writers. There sat
some of Europe's most distinguished men of letters presiding over a
meeting that systematically swept into a corner any dissent from the
prevailing opinion that the true revolutionary spirit belonged to the
Soviet Government. Did they know better? Could they have known
better? Must we call into question the good faith of all organizers
and participants? These are sore questions. Only Alain got off the
bandwagon. In exchanges I had with them thirty-five years after the
fact, both Aragon and Malraux reaffirmed the genuinely antifascist
