Telephone ... But No Visa

...A cople of weeks later, Roditi was re fused his carte d'identite at the Paris Prefecture, on a technicality, and had to leave France for a few days in order not to overstay his authorized three months there as a mere tourist...

...The Paris correspondent of the London Observer, in particular, had been threatened, but her publishers and her Government had intervened energetically...

...READERS OF DISSENT will know Edouard Roditi as an occasional contributor on Islamic problems...

...During the next two days, every appeal was blocked by Roger Wybot, Chief of the responsible Division of the Siurete, who refused to communicate the relevant files to the interested French Ministries...

...He was issued the usual temporary recepisse, pending the routine investigation...

...Senac stayed in Roditi's apartment until he could find a room of his own...

...Accused at first of having gone to Algeria with Chevalier as a Communist agent, he was then challenged, since this seemed obviously untrue, to disprove fantastic evidence to the effect that he was a secret American agent whose task it had been to contact future leaders of the Algerian rebellion...

...On arrival in New York, he applied for a renewal of his American passport, which was granted immediately...

...He was told he would have to wait a year, unless he obtained priority through the support of a professional organization...

...After the Citrus conference, Roditi then spent a couple of weeks of vacation in Algeria, visited several other cities, spoke to people in all walks of life and took notes for various articles...

...Born in Paris of an American family that has resided there for three generations, ever since his grandfather was one of the founding members of the American Chamber of Commerce in the French capital, he is well-known to the French radio-public too as a frequent speaker in round-table discussions of foreign, especially American, authors published in French...

...On his return to Paris, he was surprised to find a phone installed in his new apartment...

...Early in January, he applied at the French Consulate in New York for a visa as a resident of France...

...He had im mediately reported the whole incident of his grilling and of the Prefecture's refusal to the American Consulate, which preferred not to take any action...

...A Paris correspondent of a Ceylon newspaper had also been threatened, as well as correspondents of most Moslem newspapers, including those of the more conservative and less vociferous Pakistani press...

...Proof of his being a Communist included his occasional meetings with Antonina Valentin, a popular biographer of Heine, Goya and Leonardo da Vinci who was at that time working on a biography of Picasso, which was considered sufficient evidence of her being a Communist...

...All of them had been properly protected, however, by their consular authorities...

...Though the grilling proved that his telephone wires had been tapped for close on a year, it was also clear that none of the Sirete agents had ever taken the trouble to read any of his published writings...

...The American Consul-General in Paris was persuaded only with great difficulty to file a polite enquiry with the French Foreign Ministry...

...On March 10, he was awakened in the morning in his Paris apartment by French plain-clothes police, rushed off to the same Surete offices as the last time, handed an expulsion order dated February 26, photographed, finger-printed, and told to leave France by midnight of March 12...

...On his arrival in Algiers, he discovered that he had been engaged in the same team of seven interpreters as Haakon Chevalier, the American novelist whose name was at that time being bandied about in the press as an atomic spy, alleged to have attempted to obtain information, on behalf of the Russians, from Oppenheimer, at the University of California, where Chevalier and the atomic scientist had both been on the faculty...

...Later that year, a French poet whom he had met in North Africa, Jean Senac, came to Paris for the publication of his first volume of poems, which appeared with a preface by Rene Char, in a series selected by Albert Camus, with the Paris firm of Gallimard...

...In 1954, he took an apartment in Paris and applied for the installation of a phone line...

...One of these was subsequently published in DISSENT, another in Preuves, the French counterpart of Encounter, and later in English in Jana, a monthly published by Associated Newspapers of Ceylon...

...ALL THIS OCCURRED before the outbreak of the Algerian rebellion...

...Proof of his being an American agent included Roditi's war time employment with the French radio section of the Voice of America in N.Y...

...Iry DECEMBER 1957, Roditi then came to America, to spend Christmas and New Year with his family...

...His application was forwarded to Paris with favorable comment, as he had submitted proof of having a home in Paris and sufficient means of support...

...As he was scheduled to leave shortly for Algiers to interpret there at a Conference of citrus-fruit growers and packers from Mediterranean countries, he postponed obtaining this support until his return, a few weeks later...

...Early in February, he left on an assignment for Italy and, on February 25, returned to Paris, having heard no further news of his visa-application...

...During the next three years, he continued to reside in Paris, but as a tourist, leaving France every three months...

...In London, Roditi subsequently discovered that the French Sirete had attempted to serve similar expulsion orders on several British correspondents, or had threatened them with expulsion, because their articles filed from Paris were critical of French policies in North Africa...

...Others will remember him as an American poet and critic of literature and art...

...In April 1955, Roditi was summoned one morning to the Rue des Saussaies offices of the French SQrete, where he was held ten hours and grilled by the political police...

...Only Roditi, an American free-lance writer, has failed to obtain energetic support from his government...

...Early in 1955, Roditi then applied at the Paris Police Prefecture for a renewal of his old carte d'identite as a foreign resident...