Dimmed by Experience

...Secondly, they often tried to work collectively, in pairs or as a group, ready to believe that mind and imagination do not occur exclusively in the singular...

...This argues that a doctrine of endless experimentation is as unrealistic and destructive as a doctrine of indefinite progress, and urges us to " formulate...

...The change in outlook required by such an orientation is not easy for us to assimilate...

...In the initial entry, Breton emerges as a rare heroic figure: "Critics have generally neglected or mocked the political record of Surrealism under Breton's leadership...

...A very perceptive essay on Paul Valery also stresses the notable mutual resonances of the arts and the sciences from Darwin to Einstein...

...From Hugo Ball to Max Ernst to Andre Breton, the D-S expedition sought a refinition and a reunification of mind in order to incorporate large sections of mental activity increasingly excluded by materialism (including Marxism...

...What was worse, it showed that they are often naive outside their own fields, and are as susceptible to political herding as any other class of people...

...Because we tend not to remember the relationship in an age of ever increasing specialization, when artists and scientists seem to mo ve in worlds that hardly touch, recalling it implicitly underscores the growing disunity of Western culture since 1914...

...Despite the fact that they had watched Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural henchman, steamroll the imposition of the new orthodoxy of Socialist Realism, they returned home ready to call their own Soviet-sponsored conference...

...Modern man speaks of the pastas behind him—gone, obsolete, soon out of sight, dead—and of the future as 'the prospect before us.' A responsible education will dramatize the strengths and weaknesses of both perspectives...

...This resurrects a half-forgotten, futile yet very significant event, the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, held in Paris in the last two weeks of June 1935...

...Attempts to discuss the Soviet purges were swept aside...

...With the whole affair stage-managed by those unprincipled—if talented—party hacks, Louis Aragon and Ilya Ehrenburg, justifications of Stalin's USSR and its new Popular Front strategy quickly replaced "the Defense of Culture" on the agenda...

...It was a time of pending crisis...

...The innocent eye of those early euphoric years has been notably dimmed by experience...

...only with the greatest difficulty were the delegates persuaded to even briefly consider the plight of their imprisoned and exiled fellow writer, Victor Serge...

...No one can deny the logic of this picture...

...Later, in a group of essays and reviews given a single heading, "The D-S Expedition," Shattuck presents an understanding and sympathetic account of Dada and Surrealism as a continuous movement...

...Hitler was arming fast, the great Stalinist purges were starting in Russia, the Spanish Civil War would begin within the year, and many people already realized another European war was in the offing...

...Shattuck's melancholy historical reconstruction is followed by pieces that reflect not only his sense of the classic Avant Garde's slide downhill but of the brevity of Modernism's real life...

...Perhaps, indeed, we are ready for something like a new classicism...

...Nevertheless, the author's thrust is clear...

...Without postulating a Golden Age in the heroic past, we can at least consolidate our idea of ourselves as continuous with a partially knowable history from which we learn much about our condition...

...Under pressure, Breton's political naivete took the form of an uncompromisingly principled idealism...

...In particular, he cites the Surrealists' vain attempts to counter the fissiparous tendencies starting to appear in the structure of Modernism: "As I see it, substantial effort produced limited accomplishments in two respects...

...Certainly the First International Congress was a clear and shameful example of such herding...

...It is strange, but also salutary, to find one of the foremost historians of the Avant Garde writing in this sober vein...

...But it was organized by a number of Frenchmen who had attended the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, held in Moscow the preceding year...

...These were matters that fell within the province of the meeting, and theoretically at least there was reason to expect that a group of the world's best writers would issue a meaningful collective statement for their less verbal fellow men...

...Yet, compared with Gide, Aragon and Malraux, he begins to look like an old walrus of intractable political sagacity...

...One of the few voices of dissent was raised by Paul Eluard, courageously reading a strong protest from the excluded Andre Breton...

...Instead, the gathering proved that effective as some writers may be at producing insightful and influential books, they can be singularly inept at reaching impressive joint conclusions...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Roger Shattuck deservedly received a great deal of critical approval for his penetrating study Marcel Proust as well as for The Banquet Years, his excellent, highly readable study of the "origins of the Avant Garde in France" between 1885 and World War I. This new book, a collection of essays that range from Balzac to Meyer Schapiro and Michel Tournier, inevitably lacks the formal unity of the twoearliervolumes...

...Funds for the Paris congress were thus provided by the Comintern...

...Men of supposed independence, including Gide (who later bitterly regretted it) and E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Heinrich Mann, went along like lambs with the flock...

...But what strikes one most about these essays, and gives a highly ironic cast to the title, Thelnnocent Eye, is the extent to which they record the Avant Garde's decline and—even more—disorientation after 1914...

...The inclusion of pieces on Monet's Giverny paintings, Apollinaire's experiments in transcending the genres, and Stravinsky enables Shattuck to again demonstrate the interconnection of the arts in the vital prewar period...

...Anthropologists inform us that among the Bolivian Quechua a person is conceived as moving through time backward—that is, with the past visible in front of him, the future invisible behind him...

...The invitation committee consisted of French Communist authors plus distinguished fellow travelers, among them Andre Gide and Andre Malraux...

...Its pretext was excellent: to have writers consider the fate of their society and culture in view of the rising threat of Fascism that was at last beginning to be taken seriously...

...and meditate on" an alternative that will adjust our attitude toward the past: "The idea that a cycle of Faustian discovery is coming to an end can serve as a corrective to our romantic notions of progress and soul error—the constant search for a Utopian elsewhere...

...Another dissenter was Julien Ben-da, who at the end of the congress must have felt that the title of his best-known book, The Treason of the Intellectuals, accurately described the proceedings...

...The keynote to Shattuck's approach is sounded by the opening essay, "Having Congress: the Shame of the Thirties...

...The generally elegiac mood of The Innocent Eye is probably most apparent in a long essay entitled "The Demon of Originality...

...It served him better than the conciliatory maneuver-ings of the literary figures who led the congress...