152
PARTISAN REVIEW
Around the Torch of Liberty
EMIGRE NEW YORK: FRE CH I TELLECTUALS IN WARTIME MA HATTA ,
I940-I944 .
By Jeffrey Mehlman. The John Hopkins University Press.
$4°.
00 .
A REVIEWER MUST RESIST THE TEMPTATION to blame the author for not
having written the book he or she hoped to read. Keeping this in mind,
I shall try not to express too much disappointment here. For my mouth
began to water as soon as I saw the subtitle "French Intellectuals in
Wartime Manhattan." For years I had been waiting for a reliable
account of that extraordinary time, when many of Europe's most stim–
ulating creators and thinkers found themselves huddled around a fire
labeled Torch of Liberty. While they obviously shared a rejection of
Hitler's Europe or had been rejected by it, for the most part they had not
abandoned previous differences, quarrels, even antagonisms among
themselves, and perhaps that helped to keep them alive, and to keep
them interesting to us. Although I couldn't write or revise the author's
book for him-that other temptation forbidden to reviewers-I did
make an unsuccessful attempt to read his book
my
way.
For what Mr. Mehlman has done in
Emigre
New
York
is to give us a
collection of free-standing essays, only occasionally connected, which
are profiles of interesting men (and one woman) who happened to have
resided in New York within this time frame. But what we miss is a sense
of their having shared a terrible experience-uprooted, homeless, per–
haps materially deprived. In one or two cases we are told of ideological
or personality differences, but the interconnections end there.
To begin at the end of the book: There are some masterful pages on
Saint-John Perse's poetry, on his between-the-war years as the diplomat
Alexis Leger, and some interesting insights into his relations (or lack of
them) with the Gaullist Free French. But there is hardly anything at all
about what Leger actually did in Manhattan, whom he knew, how oth–
ers reacted to him. There is also little on Claude Levi-Strauss, whom the
author picks up at the close of the war, at the moment it is decided to
liquidate the New School's Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes (founded in
1942
as a home for exile scholars from France and Belgium).
What I wanted, of course, was a little of the fascinating story of how
the Ecole Libre was put together, how it began-not how it ended. Or,
if the author is to step out of his own time frame so easi ly, shou ldn't he
have begun with the same New School's University in Exile, founded at
