H.J. Kaplan
LETTER FROM PARIS
June 10, 1990
Dear William:
Your letter as you have doubtless surmised by now has followed me
here - a few metro stops from the Place du Palais Bourbon, ti"om which
Partisan Rev iew
received its first postwar Paris reports, written if not al–
ways signed by yours truly. No sign ora commemorative plaque on Number
8, where my next-door neighbor was the Comtesse de Chambrun. But who
in your current crop of readers would recognize that name? Or even that of
her father, the infamous Laval? In those days - almost half a century ago! -
Stalin and Stalinism seemed ()rever in the East. Only the West was in ques–
tion. And here in France, aside fi"om controlling much of the countryside, the
Communists held commanding positions in the culture.
Now I expect that the young, who like the poor are always with us,
will condescend to us and suggest that we exaggerated the peril. They wi ll
be wrong. The worst, as the French like to say, is not always inevitable, but
when everything is at stake it is axiomatic that you prepare for the worst.
Even your o ld friend Boris Souvarine, who so tirelessly insisted that Soviet
power was built on
blufl~
was willing to admit that under certain circum–
stances blufF was enough to win the game. In the event it was enough, quite
apart fi"om the poker hands we won and lost, to release counterforces among
us - economic, cu ltural, political - that we now take for granted since, {or
better or worse, they are what we have become.... Which reminds me of
the story (guaranteed authentic by another defunct cold warrior, icholas
Nabokov) about the exiled Berliner who returned to his native city in 1946
and, sitting in a taxi on the way from Tempelhof to his billet somewhere
among the rubble, confessed to the driver who had remarked upon his
Berliner accent that yes, he had been away for awhi le. "For a long whi le?"
the driver wanted
to
know. "Since 1932, in fact. " A si lence ensued during
which the driver worked hi s way around some shapeless ruin and at length
produced this brief and (according
to
Nabokov) typically
bnlinerisch
obser–
vation: "Ah? ... Well, then, you haven't missed much."
I cannot leave this story without noting that there exist other, non-
Editor's
I
ote: This piece is a response
to
a leller from the editor asking M
r.
Kaplan
to
write abolillhe French reaction
to
the events in Eastem ElI l"Ope.
