The Loss of Paris

...She is of a generation, and of a temperament, that saw art and politics as separate entities, and she has kept them separate in her writing long after they ceased being so in reality...

...Nor is any American writer ever again going to have this feeling about French life and art...

...Prefering more civilized modes of action and discourse than French politics-than any politics-has, in these years, afforded an observer of her temperament, Miss Flanner is, paradoxically, often at her best in writing about political developments as if they were figments of a play or a novel...

...that someone who knew what it was like then should have survived to comment on what it is like now...

...Is this perhaps another way of saying that Miss Flanner is, inevitably, a spokesman for her generation-the generation that fell in love with Paris in the '20s when it was, without question, the artistic capital of Western culture...

...But as France has prospered over the past two decades, Miss Flanner has had to report-and report quickly-a good deal of material, especially in the political realm, that does not make very satisfactory rereading...

...Miss Flanner has been fortunate, of course, in reporting a country in which style still counts for so much, in which it still remains so individual and so public...

...What the French did or did not eat in those days, the numbing temperatures of their winter rooms, the ration of butter and the price of bread to put it on, prompted her most lucid and sympathetic writing...

...For it was this idea that, to a degree unknown elsewhere, had been raised in Paris to the status of a privileged vocation...

...Miss Flanner writes of those first years after the war like an elder member of the family reporting the slow and painful recuperation of a beloved relation: She does not skimp the lingering signs of the malaise, nor its permanent effects...

...The scenes of repatriated survivors returning to Paris from the concentration camps are unforgettable...

...She is a virtuoso of the impressionist vignette, of the quick sketch-from life-that gives the subject's shape and weight and general climate of feeling, even if it conveys little or nothing of its internal complexities...

...It serves her beautifully in the opening sections of the Journal when the tragedy and deprivation of French life-but a deprivation still colored by the idealism of the Liberationneeded only to be looked at, and reported without elaboration, to be intensely graphic and moving...

...The grand type of French he spoke and thought in put him two hundred years away from his listeners on the radio...

...In the details of the nearly endless succession of governmental crises that preceded de Gaulle's coming to power in 1958 she has preserved a good many paragraphs that can now, because they are so little amplified by any real analysis or reflection, only bore...

...As compelling as they may have been at certain moments of crisis, they cannot compete with those figures of the past-Marshal Pétain or Léon Blum-who embody, for Miss Flanner, something deeper and more permanent in the fabric of French culture, and who call forth all her eloquence...

...There are touching glimpses of Mendès-France, as there are some cold sentences on Poujade, but the political figures of the '50s do not really kindle her interest, and what she says of them is largely routine...

...No one is going to write journalism quite like this ever again: Not even the New Yorker can afford to tread quite so lightly over such troubled terrain...

...The political situation, the commanding position of Stalinism in French cultural life, Lionel Trilling wrote in 1952, "does not prevent our having the old affinity with certain elements of that life, but it makes the artistic and intellectual leadership of France unthinkable...

...But it was also a period which saw a resurgence of the theatrical and cinematic arts that still commands envy and respect for an American, who, if he is devoted to films or the stage, has had, perforce, to be a man without a country...

...Paris alive has not been able to compete in her affections for the Paris that was dying-that, in 1966, is just about dead...

...However one may esteem Sartre or Camus or Beckett as writers, they scarcely invite the emotions that Miss Flanner lavishes on, for example, her beautiful evocation of the funeral of Colette...

...In particular, she has been remiss in failing to grasp the ideological romance that has presided over the most serious French writing in the years under discussion...

...In the case of Sartre, it looks as if we shall finally have a criticism equal to this task when Lionel Abel's study is published...

...This may be a credit to her judgment and taste, as well as a reflection of her age, but it is obviously a liability to her as a writer of weekly topical articles...

...Indeed, Miss Flanner is more comfortable in the elegiac mode than in the posture of welcoming the new, and the years since 1944 have afforded her frequent-depressingly frequent-occasion for exercising her gifts as a writer of elegant obituary...

...Certainly no writer whose intitial acquaintance with French art or life dated from the years of this Paris Journal could bring quite the same pieties to bear on so many squalid disputes, on so much in the way of intellectual fratricide and political bad faith...

...The point is that neither Miss Flanner's innocence of the issue nor our own misplaced obsession with it has proved equal to the critical task of elucidating exactly what of importance the French writers caught in the political vice of these years have had to tell us...

...One ends by envying Miss Flanner her innocence, but not longer persuaded by it...

...Not that the easiest judgments or the quickest conclusions drawn over here have proved to be more reliable...

...If Janet Flanner's Paris Journal 1944-1965 (Atheneum, 615 pp., $8.95) is not precisely the book one has been looking for, it at least has as one of its virtues-it has others as well-that it reminds us of what the scope of such a book would be...

...if anything, his work is in danger of being overrated now on exactly the groundspolitical grounds-that constituted his dismissal in the McCarthy era...

...We have needed a critical mind, informed but detached, comprehensive but sufficiently specialized to have authority and bite, that could make sense of both de Gaulle and Godot, of both the political illusions that have beclouded French political life since the Liberation and the works of art that, sometimes abetting those illusions and sometimes subverting them, have been their steady accompaniment...

...Miss Flanner's Journal is, in a sense, doubly historical: It recounts two decades just past, while it preserves a mode of feeling dating from the decades between the Wars...

...These were the years when French painting fell into an abyss of banality from which there is, as yet, no sign of recovery-when the masters were dying off, leaving no heirs...

...One's impression in reading Paris Journal 1944-1965 is that questions of this sort do not interest Miss Flanner very much...

...It was important that someone should have kept vivid for us the first-hand emotions of the old Paris...

...Such a mind would have to take hold of both the Cold War and the autonomous esthetic object, discriminating between the one and the other, while carefully measuring the erosions that politics and history have made not only on particular talents but on the very idea of the independent esthetic intelligence...

...She has thus been able to reckon significant chanse by staying close to the surface of things...

...Sartre has survived both his own politics, and ours...

...As early as March 1945, she characterized de Gaulle's oratory in words that have not had to be amended in the '60s: "In its elegant, démodé vocabulary, which stiffened his ideas into classic stateliness, his address would have been perfectly suited to the Académie...

...It is a feeling whose roots must be planted in youth, and then nourished by the most sublime experiences art can offer...

...Youth we shall have, but the art seems gravely diminished, having lost ground to darker forces...

...yet the case is reported with love...

...The brief account of the first postwar sale of underwear in the Paris department stores is the kind of thing that only she could bring off with so much feeling and so little sentimentality...

...Most of these developments Miss Flanner reports with a very clear eye...

...But if this damages her seriousness, it nonetheless affords a certain pleasure toothe pleasure of nostalgia...

...Her vivid impressionism is always at the mercy of circumstance...

...For the period embraced by Miss Flanner's copious reportage (published originally in the New Yorker under the signature of "Genêt") saw the deaths of the last representatives of the old mandarin literary generation-Gide, Claudel, and Valéryand the succession of those political moralists-Sartre, Camus, and Simone Weil-and esthetic moralistsBeckett, Sarraute, and Jean Genet-who have since sustained France's claim to intellectual pre-eminence on quite different grounds...

...Perhaps it was not an issue that the friend of Gertrude Stein or the admirer of Colette-each in her way so supremely unpolitical in her attitude toward literature -could take completely seriously, yet it has persisted as the issue with which Miss Flanner's readers on this side of the Atlantic have had to struggle most painfully in their literary intercourse with the French scene...

...For even so intelligent and informed a writer as Miss Flanner pays a price for remaining so unfailingly on the surface of her material...

...We can measure the force that this view exercised over liberal opinion in the '50s by looking back shamefacedly, on the way Sartre, for example, virtually disappeared from our literary consciousness while Camus was elevated to a position his own writings could scarcely support...

...She is superb at rendering the style of a speech, and at gauging the political implication of a style...

...she never overstates the strength of the patient...

...Impinging upon this shifting cultural terrain, at once animating its energies and impeding its independent growth, has been a political history almost too fragmented and frenetic to be borne by a sensibility that so obviously prefers the café, the theater, and the printed word to the sordid rituals of power...