JED PERL
645
forth in all sorts of circumstances - shines through. He describes get–
ting together entertainment for the inmates.
There was a tall boy who once had a bay window. He was a
cabinet maker, specializing in luxurious coffins. It had borne lit–
tle influence on his mentality. He was good-humored and full of
indomitable vitality. Gifted for clowning, he imitated the best
music hall singers, and made everyone of us laugh heartily. In
addition, he inspired the others, and organized them. With
all
the unavoidable quarrelling, jealousies, and troubles, that such
affairs involve, we composed a theatrical unit of ten actors; a
singing one, of fifteen . From one harmonica in March, the or–
chestra grew to twenty-four instruments by December. With the
complicity of a sentry particularly anxious to make ten or twenty
percent profit, we found and bought
all
sorts of old instruments,
in the city: horns, violins, banjos, accordions , bugles, drums,
with money collected from the spectators .
All during his time on the ship, Helion is planning his escape. He
leaves one afternoon and, after many near misses and the kindness
of strangers along the way, makes his way back to Paris, an occupied
city.
Now I wished I had avoided Paris . The beloved city was there to
meet me, outside the station door , but in what a state! It had
become pale and thin, like the few civilians on the sidewalks . . ..
Uneasy, I entered a cafe, and from the booth called several of
my friends, without success. Either their telephone had been
disconnected, or they were away. At last I reached one, and
when I told him my name he said:
"It is impossible!" and I asked if I could come and explain to
him why it wasn't.
"Immediately," he said, and I took the subway.
Finally there's the escape from occupied France, and so to America.
Helion spent a year writing his book in English (it's never appeared
in France), and one feels, closing it, that Helion might say of
himself, with Leger, "The war changed me." Leger was, according
to Helion, the first to write to him when the book came out, with the
exclamation . "Quelle belle aventure!"
Helion's postwar work - all forty-odd years of it - is a long
hymn to the strange and marvelous variety of daily life. In Helion's
