Books and Writers
KOESTLER, ARTHUR
Books and Writers Literary Ballyhoo By ARTHUR KOESTLER THE people who administer literature in England 'I —literary editors, critics, essayists: the man-aaerial clss« on Parnassus—have lately...
...Yet if the Werd "message" applied to literature has any meaning, it is this that its gist should remain in your memory, after the words have faded...
...yet the...
...And it is time that the admirers of the great cultural tradition of France should learn to discriminate between the halo of the real martyrs and the prismatic delusions of their own 'flu-smarting eyes...
...Later he went off on the Surrealist expedition, to the Marquesas Islands, to which they were commanded by a dream...
...He ia a musician, a composer, young, beautiful, cultured, extremely sensitive...
...It was distressing reading...
...in the broadest *b*nse he is a humanist concerned with the experiences of men and their reactions to their experience...
...For the frustrated lover of France even the names of Paris underground stations (Vavin, Leg Buttes Chaumont...
...This is what he talks about, in a low, modest, pleasant voice, his back to the fire of the sitting-room, during all the winter of 1940-41, to the old man and his niece...
...M. Vercors has learnt, as little aa the squabbling French politicians in exile...
...I read them some months ago and cannot remember a single phrase or thought) the sand has run away and all that remains is same vague fragrance...
...He was small, pale, highly strung, with cold eyes, and a shock oi dark hair brushed back from a fine brow...
...L'usage du cabinet est interdit pendant l'arret du train en gare," means only that you should not use the toilet while the train is standing in a station, but it sounds like the pure harmonica of the spheres, especially if you have been cut off from the Continent for four years...
...Three werks have come during the last year out of France, all three celebrated as literary revelations: d]s*Vi Imaginary Interviews, Aragon's volume of poem* L* irtvs'Caiur, and Vercors't he Silence de M Met...
...hwarb...
...Now the trojth is that Aragon's csreer as a Communist » at, rather in the surrealistic tradi-,l"n He toured the Spanish front in a loud-•pesker-van dispensing poetry to the militiamen at the time when Malraux organised the later-national Squadron <>r the Republican Air Force, and ( ornford and Ralph Fox died on the front...
...of all Europe," as has been done, is an insult to Europe and a blasphemy of the dead...
...by day they dealt in secondhand cars, at night they donned the emperor's clothes...
...do not mesa that all writers should hare imitated their example, I only mean that if words " meaning, they were the heroes and ¦ertyrs and not the Aragon-tvpe...
...speak ia the same of France are silent...
...psychological shocks may produce diametrically opposed results...
...Reaumur-Sevastopol, Porte des Lilas) become the nostalgia-imbued stimuli of conditioned reflexes: first there is that flutter and twitch of the heart, then the mucus of the French 'Flu begins to flow...
...Only thus can the contradiction be solved, can all the social implications be dodged, and the issues of the present war reduced to a woolly, patriotic Franco-German allegory in terms of 1870 or rather 1815...
...they counter balsa led their self-indulgence and cynicism with the excuse that 'all this could not touch their spiritual existence, their sharing of What they called "(a ginie /loaesto...
...If an English poet Ursa to use words like "my fatherland," "my soul," ¦fay heart," etc., he is done for...
...Books and Writers Literary Ballyhoo By ARTHUR KOESTLER THE people who administer literature in England 'I —literary editors, critics, essayists: the man-aaerial clss« on Parnassus—have lately been affected Jg « new outbreak of that recurrent epidemic, the frem h 'Flu, Its symptoms are that the patient, trdinai ily s balanced, cautious, skeptical man, is lured ^to unconditional surrender of his fririeal faculties wVn s line o( Frehe|i' poetry or prose falls under bis eyes...
...Suffering has not necessarily s purifying effect...
...an weasel heman sacrifice, straggle and despair are roafarnVtealued, and the spirit is turned int...
...For all this h,e could still be an excellent poet, and nobody would care about his private and political Past...
...There is the same ethereal boredom, a pale fluorescence which throws no shadow and has no substance behind it...
...and Auden's genius made us accept it, whether we agreed in principle or not Aragon's revelations were always a decade too late: he discovered Communism during the Moscow purges and the lyricism of the non-Euclidean geometries during the French defeat...
...After a period of disillusion and self-disgust he . . . broke with Surrealism on Political grounds and joined the more impersonal Communist Party...
...Koeatler's restless mind is preoccupied with many problems...
...Gide's message to the young intelligentsia tags like the Emperor's new clothes...
...it is, in microcosm, part of bis search for the temper of our timea...
...Stripped of these nostalgia-reflexes and associated over and under-tones, to the nakedness in which an English poet faces his infallible reviewers, Aragon would probably be judged as a competent craftsman, one among the larger frogs of the smaller puddles, who "on condition that he succeeded in ridding himself of his mannerisms, facile stunts, his sometimes abstract, sometimes maudlin imagery, and so on...
...Judged by his Imaginary Interview* Gide has changed little, if net for the worse...
...he admires and loves France, knows the French classics inside out, and is convinced that the war will end in an eternal reconciliation, a kind of spiritual marriage between Germany and France, under the cultural tutelage of the latter...
...Ourcq—vautour— cour), which makes one's hair bristle, and concludes with his usual modesty: "I shall now stop with my examples, convinced of having shown the way to all seekers of new poetic equations, and already anticipating those...
...4 Note on Koestler A RTHUR KOE8T-LBS, journalist, novelist, diarist, hss provided some of the freshest insights into recent social history 1 in his novels "Dark-J aeaa at Noon" and "Arrival and Depar-, tare',, hia diaries, "Dialogue With Death" and "Scum of the Earth," and his articles in the New York Times commenting on the defeats of the "Left...
...Every word and thought of this enlightened aristocrat is diametrically opposed to Nazism...
...I lift my voice and say that it is not true that there are no new rhymes when there is a new world...
...Besides the poems Le Crive Cosur contains an essay by Aragon, called "The Rhyme in 1940," which is highly revealing...
...Therefore von Ebrennac becomes a kind of schizophrene or sleep-walker, who, in spite of his versatile intelligence has apparently never read a speech of Hitler's, nor seen a newspaper in the ten years between the Reichstag fire and the attack on Poland...
...On the second evening, at the latest, his nerves would go to pieces and he would either do something hysterical, e.g...
...These young* middle-class Frenchmen lived in a split world of le bifteck and I'esprit...
...he 7*8•taeniaaa a fagitive aa we are given 5 P"«».al*s)i...
...but the author obviously hates the term anti-Fascist, hates the idea that a man's loyalty to a political conviction may override his patriotic loyalties...
...the first is the return from rhymeless to rhymed poetry, which in some surrealist way, is linked for him with the French defeat: "We are writing 1940...
...Secondly, they are in French, i.e...
...The author tells ua about a number of innovations which he introduced into French poetry...
...there is a thin, rarefied atmosphere about him and his books...
...The third is whet are technically called "imperfect rhymes" (e.g...
...Psychologically the whole story is phoney, hut politically it is worse...
...I would risk a bet that when M. Vercors' identity is disclosed he will turn out to be a French Fascist or at least a staunch reactionary...
...acquiescent nods, by which, in the spring of 1941, similar considerations will be received...
...But to call Crive Ccrur "the S.O.S...
...His influence on the younger French generation was deplorable (not be-cauae of his twisted eroticism, as the Vichy Fascists reproached him: one.does not become an invert by reading books), but because of the arrogant spiritualism it imparted, an attitude of being initiated, the illusion of belonging to some exclusive order, of sharing seme exquisite values, which, however, if you tried to define them, ran like sand through your fingers...
...Who has so far introduced into French poetry the language of the radio or that of the non-Euclldesn geometries T " ? • * VLfE have heard all this (the use of technical and scientific terms in poems) in the thirties from the New Writing group...
...if a French one dissecans musical platitudes about la Patrie, la France, 3C oatar and woii Am*, the patient begins to quiver with admiration...
...They know, as the Chines* proverb says, that latere ia a time to ge ..at ashing sad s time to dry the nets...
...move—love...
...have read the Gide interviews carefully, gay greedily: with the greed one would listen to news from the planet Kan...
...All I hi* literary bally baa gives about aa irae a picture at the wis peeple of Franca aa fMywead at the aadtrgr—ad staves**at In Faroe...
...On announcing this decision, the niece (who is of course in love with him as he is with her), speaks her first and last word to him— "Adieu...
...A BOUT Leais Aragon, we read in the preface of Le Criv* Car: . "I first met him (Aragon) on a summer evening at, ti»e fair oi Neuilly, where he an 1 the youthful band of Surrealists, their white cravats mminous >a the dark, were paying court to the only woman in the world for them, the charming and intelligent Femme-Tronc, who, without arms or legs, revolved on a pedestal, like a bust, and autographed her photo with a pen in her mouth...
...They tell us that ne was arrested for an anti-military poem, went to Russia . . ." etc., and that when the war broke out was a Communist placed in a post of particular danger...
...Similar considerations apply to the behavior of the girl and the old man during those "more than hundred nights...
...in spite of the fsct that these two never speak a word, never open their mouths and for over a hundred winter evenings listen to his monologues in the atony silence of deaf-mutes, the old man smoking his epe, the niece stitching away on some em-oidery...
...shake the old man by his shoulders, or slam the door, go to his own room and never enter the sitting room again...
...The officer's name is Werner von Ebrennac...
...I repeat, nobody expects that writers should he heroes, and that Isherwood, for example, should join the Commandos...
...J ultras in the case of hay-fever one whiff to luffii ient to-release the attack, thus a single word {fa •'b<,)UI<t)>aiue," "creve-caur," "patrie" V "min-itis* is%"nough to produce the most violent spasms: Us eyes water, his heart contracts in bitter-sweet convulsion*, his ductless glands swamp the blood stream with adolescent raptures...
...Finally Werner goes on leave to Paris, finds out that the Nasi* are beasts (in spite of being a supporter of the Weimar Republic, cultured, extremely sensitive, etc., etc., this has never occured to htm before) and decides in despair to get himself killed by volunteering for the Russian front...
...In this article his interests are on a narrowed scale...
...D. B...
...The article appeared originally ia the pages of the London Tribune...
...His discussion of Andre Gide, Leais Aragon and "Vereoura" ia more than literary criticism...
...Hal there is a black msrket in literal are...
...they melt in one's mouth like Turkish Delight...
...The story runs as follows:— A German officer is billeted in a< French house in which live an old manand his niece...
...nobody dared to confess that he could not see them...
...and they certainly never quoted their own miscarried strophes as examples to be imitated...
...First of all, each line ends in a rhyme, a pleasure which we have been deprived of for a long time...
...Now poets ever since Donne and Goethe have used imperfect rhymes if they couldn't help it—but they never tried to convert a shortcoming into a philosophy...
...He then quotes a number of further examples of his new rhymes (ivresse—est—ce...
...Now take this story first from the psychological angle: Can you imagine a sensitive man going on talking for over one hundred nights to people who cut him and never answer...
...bat the straggle of the Left is no operetta, and the dressing-tip of operetta-heroes, which is another symptom of the French 'Flu, makes one feel very nasty indeed, if for no other . reason out of respect for our dead...
...IIi» arrest "for •"<< military paean" was a erne-day farce...
...The story ia told by the old man in the first person singular...
...It as of aa serves* ta the Frtmub ease, aad it daaaaeaasiy sidstrashi **•*!*'<• atWatiea frees the real preh-hasa wiatoa we shall have ta far...
...So far Aragon's own comments to Le Crsve-Catur...
...might (pat on the shoulder) one day become a very good poet...
...Its author is said to be ¦ well-known French writer hiding behind a pseudonym...
...Koestler examines three recent French literary books in order to- probe end understand the mood of France today...
...hat »s a tourist to speak at • W''engross: he was not placed "tm • post of particular danger," bat served as a junior oarer in the Medical Corps—where he doubtless did his duty as many others did...
...propagators of the French 'Flu feel driven to present Aragon not only as a poet, but as a hero and martyr of the Lift...
...V FINALLY, there is Vercors* Le Silence de la Mer...
...OUTs writings have always shown a touch of esoteric arrogance...
...His second discovery is to do away with punctuation, which makes his sentences^ all melt Into one lump like chocolates gone soft in your pocket...
...Others who could legitimate...
...As to the poems themselves they make, given the background of our nostalgia for France, extremely melodious reading...
Vol. 27 • January 1944 • No. 1
