The Decline of Glamor. Paris, I am rather surprised to find, has no longer much glamor for me. In some ways it seems commonplace. After the war, one felt that Europe had been wrecked, and this gave it a certain tragic interest, but now a country that has to any extent recovered is inevitably seen as belonging to a more and more standardized, a more and more Americanized world.
I went one night to the Olympia Music Hall, which I remembered from the early twenties as a rather uninspired imitation of the similar theaters in London. I had seen Little Tich there. Now I sat through a first half that consisted of vaudeville acts, some of them very good, but was astonished by a second half which featured American-type entertainment of the coarsest and most raucous kind: a jazz orchestra, a spasm of the Twist, women torch singers, tremendously applauded, who never let up on their nervous Twist steps. They sing into a microphone, which is sometimes held in the right hand and sometimes comes out of the corsage, with a great cable like a garden hose. When a guitarist accompanies the songstress, also with a microphone cable, it looks as if they are going to skip rope. The singers and the compère and the comics and the monologist all deafen you and grate upon you with their horrible magnified voices. It is impossible to escape from these voices. If you move to the rear of the balcony, they come out of the backs of the seats in front of you. I had been puzzled by the posters and the names in lights outside, which announced such American-sounding stars as “Billy Holladay,” of whom I had never heard, but they all turned out to be French. It was fashionable to be American, and they occasionally sang an American song, which I imagine they had learned by rote. The men often had Beatle haircuts. One called himself Leny Escudero, but actually came from Belleville, one of the more squalid sections of Paris. The teenagers in the audience sometimes made such a row that one could not even hear the blaring voices. When the Beatles appeared at the Olympia, one could not hear a word or a note.
Versailles Under de Gaulle. We took our daughter to Versailles on a holiday. Gray weather; a great flock of petit-bourgeois visitors. These French seemed dreary and dwarfed, and so alien to the royal château, with its gardens and its great galleries, its huge portraits and wall-filling paintings of crowded historical scenes, that these latter had themselves the appearance of something discarded and shopworn, shoved away behind museum barriers, no longer felt by the people—who moved past them with no signs of interest—as having any real relation to themselves. The glorious past was no longer there, though, remotely, it lurked in the background in the anachronistic figure of de Gaulle. He seems to make no contact with the people. We encountered no enthusiasm for him. I don’t think they particularly enjoy him but they don’t know what they would rather have.
Gleams from the Past. I was reminded for a moment, in the restaurant at Versailles, of my winter excursions to Contrexéville, in the company of army friends, when, at the time of the first war, I was stationed at Vittel in the Vosges: the cold tiled floor, the bare winter light, the red wine that warmed us at dinner, the smell of the cold tiled toilet; and in Paris I remembered the excitement of my visits to Paris on furlough, when I stayed at the American University Club in the Rue de Richelieu, and was enchanted by the bookshops in the Avenue de l’Opéra, with big price signs on the second-hand sets, and by the productions of Sacha and Lucien Guitry, with the delightful gamine Yvonne Printemps, at that time the wife of Sacha. I thought, in the Bois de Boulogne, of a scene there with my first great love, when I went to France in the summer of 1921, and this brought back my many evenings at the out-of-door Théâtre de l’Oasis, for which Mme Picabia had been able to recruit Yvette Guilbert, Aristide Bruant and other vedettes of the nineties. And then there was the autumn of 1935, when I stopped over on my way back from Russia and saw the Jolases, the Malraux and the Joyces, and, coming from the Soviet Union, was charmed by the coiffures and general chic—so little in evidence now—of the women one saw in the theaters.
But all such things had now fallen back onto the map of a much flatter world, in which Washington and Boston and New York were centers at least as active as Paris; in which France and England seemed comparatively supine, while the United States was energetic and aggressive. Paris now is almost a provincial city, though de Gaulle, with la gloire and la France, hovers high in the empyrean and Malraux tries to make the place shine by cleaning up the ancient monuments—it is somewhat disconcerting, however, to find the Louvre turning yellow—and ringing changes on the opera houses and theaters. The Opéra has been given a new lease on life; we heard an excellent Wozzeck, sung in German, and the best production of Carmen I remember, realistic rather than romantic, with costumes and sets out of Goya.
French Canada. It is curious to find that French Canada, about which I am now writing articles, does not seem so remote in Paris as I had been expecting it would. In its present nationalistic phase, it makes, in the French-speaking world, a point of intense vivacity. For the first time since Louis XV refused to send the French Canadians reënforcements against the English and sold them out at the Peace of Paris, the mother country has been taking some interest in them. De Gaulle is making passes at French Canada, has established a center there, and Malraux has visited Quebec and orated to the Québecois, telling them that they, too, are French—démarches which, however, I gather, have not always been well received; they cannot compensate for two centuries of scornful indifference. We have seen a documentary French film in which the Province of Quebec is presented as a patriotic French colony which ought to be recognized as an integral part of the realm of France. It included a short speech by one of the leaders of the nationalist movement, who aimed, as it was explained, to be President of a French Canada independent of English Canada, and the new big buildings of Montreal were exhibited with the apparent implication that they were the work of French Canadians. There is a French Canadian library in Paris, from which I have been getting books through a young French Canadian friend, who works both in a Paris news agency and on the Larousse encyclopaedia. Professor Étiemble, in his book, Parlez-Vous Franglais?,” suggests that the obnoxious “living,” now used instead of “salon” for “living room,” be eliminated by substituting for it the French Canadian word vivoir.
The Details of Change. It was some time before I was able to take account of all the things that made Paris seem so different: the abolition of urinals, the prostitutes driven off the streets (both the results of a de Gaulle cleanup), the disappearance of the Paris Herald, the absence of that strong-smelling petrol that I had always remembered as of the essence of Paris, the almost total disappearance of the pretty and well-turned-out Parisian women. Then the signs, which are likely to be printed in German and English as well as in French—and there are many American signs. Frenchmen still take hours for lunch, locking up their offices and banks, but they also today have quick-lunch rooms, which they can only describe as “snack bars,” since—the institution being quite new—there is as yet no word for this in French. And, finally, the atmosphere of official repression, which, I suppose, has been partly brought on by the struggle against the Algerian conspirators. I have never before felt this in Paris. The government now censors books and papers for both moral and political reasons. De Gaulle’s opponent Defferre, the Socialist Mayor of Marseille, is never allowed to be heard on either radio or television. It is dismaying to find Parisians, in a place like the Café de la Paix, looking about them, as people used to do in Moscow, to make sure that they will not be overheard.
The Young People. But perhaps the most striking change is in the attitude of the young toward the old; the traditional submission to parents and acceptance of established conventions now seem largely to have broken down. A young professor at the Sorbonne told me that he would never, in his student days, have ventured to address a professor—if you wanted to communicate with him, you had to write him a letter—but that nowadays his own students did not hesitate to speak to him with the utmost freedom; they did everything except tutoyer him. The young people now have for their elders—for anyone, that is, over forty—a whole pejorative vocabulary. The first and commonest term was, I believe, les croulants (“the crumbling ones”), but this is now being improved upon with more ingenious ideas: les “son-et-lumière” (“Son et Lumière” is the official name of the program for lighting up the old châteaux and broadcasting historical information) and les pas cotés dans l’Argus (“not listed in the Argus,” a paper entirely devoted to the trade in secondhand cars). Old ladies are les viocques. (This last, I understand, is not recent.) Other examples of young people’s slang are such superlatives as formid, sensass and bouledum, the last of which, it seems, is a contraction of bouleversant d’humanité. The equivalent of our “terrific” is vachement terrible or bovine terrible. One slang phrase that particularly amuses me is les zozoteurs, for les auteurs, which has a suggestion of zozoter, “to lisp.”
“La Reine Verte.” We took our daughter to La Reine Verte, which sounded like an interesting novelty. It is amusing in a circus-like way, but not a serious artistic exploit, as a review had misled me to believe. This entertainment is simply a concoction of variegated and now mostly dated clichés: Surrealism, Dürrenmatt, Cocteau, jazz, electronic music, “toute la boutique.” After the first shocks and mystifications, you learn that it purports to deal with three large and obvious subjects—“l’Amour, la Mort et l’Homme.” Death is also somehow Nature and Vegetation; the character who represents her has much in common with both Cocteau’s Sphinx and Dürrenmatt’s Old Lady. The author or the producer has evidently been carried away by Grandville’s illustrations for Les Fleurs Animées, and the costumes are straight out of these. You have Grandville’s frogs and insects as well as his flowers, and even his elegantly stylized watering pot. L’Homme, like Adonis and Atthis, seems to be a “vegetable god,” who, after being slain by Nature-Death, is eventually resurrected. Enough sentimental music to offset the electronic loopings; some bizarre clowning and tumbling in a now rather ancient vein, which would undoubtedly have left Cocteau unmoved. At the close of the first act, somebody yelled something about “blague,” but if the producer had hoped for anything like the demonstrations over Le Sacre du Printemps—the reviews having suggested audacity—there was no possibility of it. Even for a really andacious talent such as that of Jean Genet, it is probably impossible, in the theater, to become so outrageous as to rouse the public. All the horrors and the moral perversities have become an accepted routine; all the grotesqueries have been calmly digested; no dissonance any longer jars. They have all been absorbed by the boulevard, and La Reine Verte is nothing if not boulevard. (Since this was written, however, a semi-private attempt to put on the stage La Philosophie dans le Boudoir of the Marquis de Sade has been stopped by the Paris police. The de Gaulle administration has been very strong against pornography.)
Le Doux Train-Train de Notre Vie Paisible et Monotone. Here in Paris, at the Hôtel de Castille, just opposite the Ritz Bar—where Henry James once lived in a building now owned by Chanel, and Turgenev in the Rue de Rivoli, just around the corner—with our daughter away at school, we have settled down to a life which resembles unexpectedly our life in Cambridge. As usual, I read and write and buy the English weeklies, as well as L’Express, Paris-Soir, and sometimes Le Canard Enchaîné, which is today making fun of de Gaulle in exactly the same systematic and rather monotonous way as, at the time of the first war, it made fun of Clemenceau. In the evenings, we go to the theater or, just as we did on Brattle Street, to some promising French or foreign movie. Usually, we take advantage of our demi-pension arrangement by dining at the hotel here. Altogether, it is very pleasant.
For me, it is especially a pleasure—after having, in connection with writing about Canada and our Civil War, had to read a good many mediocre books—to be able to enjoy at last some really well-written ones: Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, the excellent selection by Auden of Walter De la Mare’s poetry, a volume of Saintsbury’s called Miscellaneous Essays, which I had never seen before but picked up at Blackwell’s in Oxford (Saintsbury at his best, in his middle period: 1892)—a masterly study of the differences between English and French literature, little essays on minor French writers such as Chamfort, Parny and Dorat, and essays on the development of English prose which contain the first sketches of his later long work on the history of English prose rhythm. If these papers were ever read by the Partisan Review boys and the other New York critics of their school, they would either not understand them or, if they did, be filled with despair. By the “explicating” New Critics and the academic myth-and-symbol men they could never be read at all. An essay on the English novel is less satisfactory than the others. Saintsbury is supercilious about Howells and Henry James, and seems to believe that the return to romantic fiction—which I think produced nothing lasting except, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson, who is best when he is not being too romantic—is a perfectly splendid thing.
Inedibility of Paul Claudel. I saw that the Barrault company was doing Claudel’s play Le Soulier de Satin. I thought that I ought to go and got the text to read it first. Though I had never been attracted by what I knew of Claudel, I had a certain curiosity about him, and especially about this play, which a lady whose taste I respect had told me she read at twenty, when it made a deep impression upon her. But I only lasted halfway through, and I felt I couldn’t face a performance. I have rarely disliked a book so much. There are occasional gleams of poetry, but the combination of rhetoric and religiosity, the supersexual and antisexual idealism that seems so effortful and not quite sincere, was rejected by my literary stomach. The preposterous hero and heroine are prevented from consummating their passion by the fact that the latter is married, and they are supposed to be enjoying a higher bliss through the self-denial this imposes. It turned out that what had impressed my friend was that the heroine had safeguarded herself from temptation by pledging herself to the Virgin. She says that this had the effect of persuading her not to flinch from exposing herself to temptation.
Yet some passages in Le Soulier de Satin—in which the characters do a great deal of travelling and which does aim at a certain universal scope—made me feel again the flimsiness of human life. Surrounded by the void of the universe, we agitate ourselves, one must sometimes feel, to very dubious purpose. Our little lives soon go out, and is it really at all surprising that in order to fulfill our immediate desires we should not shrink from extinguishing other lives, from sending them out into the void before us? Eventually, we shall go blank. What difference does it make, after all, if we terminate a few other existences in order to prolong our own?
Livid Daylight The French naturalistic novelists were always talking about “un jour blafard.” You would find in them such descriptions as “Un jour blafard était tamisé au travers les rideaux de guipure sale.” You have to spend a winter in Paris really to know what this jour blafard is. It is what you get most of the time. I composed a short poem on the subject:
HIVER PARISIEN
Le jour blafard
Donne le cafard.
It makes you, as Elena [my wife] says, sympathize with the eagerness of the boy in Proust to see real sunlight falling on the balcony, which means that he can go out to the Champs Élysées.
Assassination of Kennedy. Elena much upset emotionally. We both had had bronchial and sinus colds, and that weekend we sat dismally in the hotel room surrounded by the ghastly newspapers. The whole thing is sickening: the sordidness of the assassins—a schizoid boy who had thought he was a Marxist, a boastful crook who ran a small night club; the ineptitude of the Dallas police; the humiliating position of the President, who had had to run around the country soliciting political support. I was surprised at the reaction in France and, as I gathered, in Europe generally. The Parisians had been putting on a great show of anti-Americanism. Elena has been more aware of this, in her everyday contacts with people, than I have. She says that when she has asked in a shop for anything that sounded American, the reply was “Ce n’est pas français, ça,” but that now the people in shops and even the taxidrivers are likely to commiserate with her. This shows how much, in Europe, they have really been counting on us, with Kennedy at our head, to come to the rescue of the West. Though they rail at us, they have envied and idealized us. They do not know what the United States is like now; they imagine that we are safe and comfortable. And now Kennedy, who had been doing his best, against truculent and well-organized opposition, to establish an enlightened administration—to work for a reduction of taxes, a guarantee of civil rights for the Negroes and a peaceful settlement with Russia—has fallen victim to the worst elements in American society: the gangsters, the delinquents, the baboons of the South. When Kennedy was received in Dallas, according to Henry Brandon, who was there—the Washington correspondent of the London Sunday Times—there was a plane overhead with a streamer that said, “Coexistence is Surrender,” and pickets protesting against his policy in regard to the Negro. Someone is reported to have said, “Whoever did it, I’m glad he got the nigger-lover!”
“Home Thoughts from Abroad.” Helen [our daughter] writes from her school in Switzerland that she has been homesick, since the murder of Kennedy, to talk to other Americans. I feel sometimes—since seeing Don Stewart and Tom Matthews in London—that I need to talk to Americans, but I should dread going back at this moment. I was finding it a strain before I left, and now it seems even more forbidding. Nicholas Nabokov tells me that when he was last—not long ago—in New York, he had a certain feeling of apprehension that he might not get away without being beaten up. A bullying taxidriver had tried to convert him to Seventh Day Adventism. I was told by the wife of the Washington correspondent of one of the Paris papers that she had been oppressed in Washington by the fear of she didn’t know what and was anxious to be back in Paris.
Lee Oswald’s violent acts have obviously something in common with the riotings and wreckings that have been going on at home. The recent student riot at Princeton was one of the worst on record. The students tore down the President’s fence and destroyed a lot of other property. When I talked about this with the former Master of one of the Yale houses, he asked me whether I had ever been involved in a riot, and told me about one at Yale. He found that he had lost all authority: if you tried to say anything to restrain them, they would simply throw something at you. There had been, also, before I left, the meaningless outbreak of young people—who did thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to an expensive Long Island house—as the aftermath of an engagement party.
Later, in Manchester, when I saw Marcus Cunliffe, one of the Englishmen who knows most about the United States, he was speculating as to whether the very distinction, combined with the advantages, of Kennedy had not aroused an envious resentment in the breasts of a good many of his countrymen. That the President of the United States should be rich, good-looking, full of charm, young-appearing yet extremely competent, married to a beautiful wife—surely all this was hard to forgive. How a Lee Oswald must have hated him! And how relieved many people must have been at seeing this brilliant figure extinguished! I think there may be something in this. There is certainly a sulky rebellion against all forms of seriousness and superiority, the acceptance of standards of excellence. The beatniks represent it in literature, the Abstract and Pop painters in art, and in music you have it in such exploits as those of John Cage, when, for example, he asks people to listen to six radios simultaneously playing different programs. In all this, mediocre abilities or men with no ability at all are trying to divert attention by demonstrating against discipline.
The much advertized film Cleopatra, of which, just before I came over, I saw the first half in Boston but couldn’t stand to stay for the rest, is so stupid, in such bad taste, and so incoherent and senseless that, made at such tremendous expense, I thought at the time that it indicated some great emptiness and bankruptcy in American life.
Montmartre. On Sunday afternoon, December 1st, we went for a walk on Montmartre—Place Pigalle, Place Clichy—where I don’t think I have been for years. There were a good many people out—small and dark and unenlivened, quiet and almost morose, as they strolled past the five-franc strip-tease joints, the booths that sold cheap sausages and pastry, and the posters for movies full of violence and vice. They reminded me of the low-spirited strollers that I had seen in Moscow in 1935, trying feebly to enjoy themselves in the Park of Culture and Rest.
The Rat in the Place de l’Opéra. We have been both more or less ill all winter. The winter weather has always been bad in Paris, but I have never had to spend a whole winter here before. Nowadays the air is bad as well as the weather: impregnated with the damp, it is poisoned by the fumes from the cars and made stifling by the central heating. You wake up half asphyxiated. We went finally to a nose-and-throat doctor. I remarked that the air was bad, and he said yes, of course it was: it had become a serious problem for the city. He told me that an experiment had been performed to find out just how bad it was. A caged rat had been exposed to the fumes of the Place de l’Opéra, very near which we have been living: “He was dead at the end of half an hour.” We found that the chambermaids had heard this impressive story. One wonders whether anything more—now that the lethal character of the air has been so definitely constaté—has been done about the situation.
Simone de Beauvoir. I have read, or rather skipped through, the second and third volumes of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs: La Force de l’Âge and La Force des Choses. She is certainly a very boring woman and a very unattractive writer. She has absolutely no sense of humor and no sense of proportion or of literary form. She tells you about every movie that she and Sartre went to together, very often without adding any comment. Her attitude toward distinguished contemporaries with whom she has been acquainted is entirely determined by their relations with Sartre. Camus did not approve of Sartre’s politics, and a serious rupture occurred; Jouvet did not produce Sartre’s plays; in the case of Malraux, it is difficult to know precisely what Simone de Beauvoir’s grievances are, but it is obvious that the de Gaulle Minister and the obstinate supporter of the Communists must be unsympathetic to one another. It is embarrassing to read her account of her relations with Nelson Algren and of Sartre’s requesting her by cable to defer her return to France on account of his affair with someone else. One ends by feeling rather sorry for Mlle de Beauvoir. I do not see why the threnody on advancing age with which the book ends should have made some women readers indignant. I found it quite honest and touching. Elena has read her book Le Deuxième Sexe and says that Simone de Beauvoir tells you everything about women except that they are attractive to men.
A Winter Mood. Nowadays, from time to time, in almost any connection, I find myself tending to feel that human works of art are futile because the beings who create them must die. Why go to so much trouble, expend so much energy and thought and taste when we are so perishable ourselves and even the things that we construct to outlast us must eventually perish, too? This mood has just been brought on by reading an essay on the rococo in a book by Cyril Connolly. He tells us to hurry up if we want to enjoy the rococo: “Even as I write some façade is crumbling; a ceiling flakes, panelling is being stripped, plasterwork crushed, chimneypieces torn out, a Chippendale looking-glass cracks and innumerable pieces of china are thumbed and shattered.”
“Der Stellvertreter.” The great theatrical sensation of the season has been Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter, done in Paris as Le Vicaire, in London as The Representative and in New York as The Deputy (these names apply to the Pope, “The Vicar of Christ on Earth”). I do not know whether there has ever in the history of the drama been a case like that of this play. Here is a work on so huge a scale that it would take seven hours to perform, and on account of the nature of the work this would hardly be practicable even if it were performed on successive evenings, like Back to Methuselah, or in the afternoon and evening of one day, like Mourning Becomes Electra. It contains a good deal that is theatrically moving and it is written in a kind of rough free verse, but too much of the dialogue consists of what are really editorial matter and news bulletins, which on the stage would be intolerably tiresome. The subject is the situation in Germany created by the murder of the Jews, and the attempts of a Jesuit priest to induce the Pope, Pius XII, to protest against these massacres. He is unsuccessful in this and decides to die a martyr’s death. He puts on the Star of David and allows himself to be sent to Auschwitz, where eventually he is shot. The exploit of Hochhuth’s hero was derived from the career of a real priest, whose story was, however, somewhat different, and there are real persons who are presented under their own names: the Apostolic Nuncio in Germany, the Pope, Eichmann and Kurt Gerstein, that mysterious S.S. officer who, wearing the Nazi uniform, worked clandestinely against the Nazis. The play includes a whole panorama of the forces involved in the situation: the Nuncio’s house and the Vatican, a Nazi beer cellar, a Jewish household, an Italian religious order which is hiding Jewish refugees, and, finally, Auschwitz in all its horror. One of the author’s effective ideas is to have the large cast of characters played by a limited number of actors, who sit at the back of the stage in a kind of drab uniform, only putting on occasional robes and headwear to come forward and play different parts, regardless of the side or faith to which these characters are supposed to belong. The implication is that any one of us might find himself in any of these roles. The play has tremendous dramatic values and is important, like the novels of Günter Grass, in representing the first efforts of German writers to confront and to deal with the immediate past. But its peculiarity is that its producers in the various countries in which it has been performed, with so wide-ranging a text to choose from, and one not well organized, have in each case made a different selection and constructed a different play.
We saw the London and Paris productions and read the original text, and these differences between them were revealing. All the Jews had been banished from the London production, and all the women except the pretty waitress Helga, and she only in the beer-cellar scene. Not to have followed her through makes this character rather pointless, for she turns up again in Auschwitz, still serving and sleeping with the soldiers and apparently hardly conscious of what is going on about her. The Nazis here were merely rowdy officers. The Auschwitz scenes were played down and, with abominable theatrical results, the whole play was bracketed between films of the prisoners and the corpses in the concentration camps. In Paris, there were Jews but no women at all, and the Nazis were as brutal and cruel as the author meant them to be. A cosmopolitan German who had been following the progress of the play said to me that it was quite impossible to induce an English actor to behave like a Nazi on the stage, but that this was not so difficult in France. At the end of the Vatican scene, the Pope, in writing the proclamation in which he fails to condemn the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews, is made by Hochhuth, as a result of nervousness, to get ink upon his hands, and a basin is brought for him to wash them. This is, of course, a reference to Pilate, and though the English included it, the French left it out. In France, there were riots at first, even with this omission, but they did not last very long and finally petered out with the releasing in the theater of a number of mice, which, it was hoped, would create a panic among the women in the audience. A lady who liked animals, however, and was not afraid of mice succeeded in catching a good many of them and put them away in her handbag.
In Italy, we were told that the play could never be produced in Rome. An attempt was later made by some independent group, but the performances were stopped by the police. Yet Der Stellvertreter—written by a Protestant and in the spirit of the Reformation—is essentially a religious play. In Germany, the set was dominated by a cross at the back of the stage. The interest of the final scenes is centered on a diabolical “doctor,” who is performing anatomical experiments and exults in sending women and children to their deaths. He is a well-educated man and has studied for the priesthood, and he keeps his arguments with the Jesuit, and hence the play itself, on a theological level by explaining that his present activities are in the nature of “a question asked of God.” “And so I risked what no man had / yet risked since the world began to turn…. / I took an oath that I would provoke the Old Man so measurelessly, / so totally beyond measure, that he would have to give an answer. / Even if it was only the negative answer, which / as Stendhal says, is all that can excuse Him: that he does not exist.” But all the good people are destroyed, and the doctor, though he knows that the war is lost and that the Allies, if they can catch him, will hang him, goes sardonically on with his crimes. This last act is perhaps too harrowing as well as too long to be performed on the stage. Hochhuth says that he has thought about this problem and wants to have the scenes at Auschwitz as little realistic, as dim and abstract, as possible, but even so, if performed as written, they would try the nerves of any audience.
Le Strip-Tease. This form of entertainment—imported from abroad: another case of a foreign word for something which had not existed in France—has now become such a feature of Paris that I thought I ought to see what they were doing with it. This turned out to be something entirely unlike our old burlesque shows of Fourteenth Street and Minsky’s. I first visited La Tomate, in the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. The theater was small and sordid. The audience consisted exclusively of rather heavy middle-aged men who sat in their overcoats, as silent, unstirring and solemn as if they were attending a funeral. One man in the front row with thick lenses read a newspaper all the time except when the girls were appearing. The intervals between these appearances were dark and rather long. A piano was played backstage. Then a voice from a loudspeaker would announce, “Je vous présente la charmante Suzanne.” But the girls did not dance or sing, as our American girls used to do, and they were not called back by the audience to take off another garment. They were simply revealed in the nude in the poses of the nudes in the cheap magazines. A few obliged with a smile, but most of them were perfectly stolid and seemed to be thinking about something else. When they went through a mild routine, they might as well have been doing setting-up exercises. The applause was no more than perfunctory, and there was something rather awful about these women displaying themselves to an audience with whom no rapport was established.
I went later to Les Folies Pigalle, a smart show with a certain reputation. Here you could order drinks, and the men brought their wives and mistresses. You were received with an oily obsequiousness which put you at once on your guard. There were two not bad-looking pickups, one blonde and one brunette, obviously attached to the house. The headwaiter tried to put me at a table against the wall next to the one where the brunette was sitting. I made a point of choosing one further away, but the brunette immediately moved in on me. She talked politely and sensibly enough, as these girls in Paris often do, and I was almost sorry to disappoint her. She said that she came from Corsica, where she had learned Italian and French at school: Corsican was different from Italian. She was “a dancer,” and she had been in Paris only three years. Before that, she had been in Geneva, where business had apparently not been good; she said the town was “très sévère.”
The show far surpassed La Tomate. There was not, from the American point of view, any real strip tease here, either. The girls would first come on in some enveloping garment, then discard it and appear quite naked. They did not even wear the conventional G-strings but only little patches. One had a pink patch in the form of a rose. The first girls were slim and extremely pretty; they were followed, in order to please other tastes, by more ample blond types with prominent breasts and behinds. The production, like La Reine Verte, was self-consciously avant-garde. In one tableau, the girl was posturing in back of a long brown object that looked like a huge stuffed seal. But this turned out to be abstract art. It had vaguely phallic protuberances, which the girl put in juxtaposition to various parts of her body, finally swooning and curling up on her back. In the intervals between the tableaux proper, there was a chorus of men and girls, who did thumping and twisting dances. I decided after a time that I had had enough, but the siren said I mustn’t miss the following number, which was indeed worth seeing and which I recognized as a daring novelty about which I had already heard. This was a man on a speeding motorcycle, with a girl riding pillion behind him. She was evidently representing the Spirit of the Motorcycle, for she very soon threw off her cloak and, now nude, floated into the air and stretched out above the cyclist, who from time to time lifted his face and kissed her on the thigh. I have a certain interest in stage “illusions,” but I could not see how this was done. The waiter wanted to bring another bottle of champagne, and my companion had of course to beg for it: “Ça me ferait plaisir.” But, after the waiter left, I told her that if I was going to spend anything more, I’d rather give it to her than to the house. I slipped her something under the table, wished her good luck and left. I was curious now to see what they would do to top the motorcycle, but didn’t want to have to be further bothered fighting off the waiter and the siren.
Christiane Rochefort. A new best-seller in Paris was a novel called Les Stances à Sophie, by a writer I had never heard of called Christiane Rochefort. A review I read led me to buy it, and it turned out to be remarkably interesting. I later got the author’s other books, and I believe she has a certain importance. Mlle Rochefort’s three novels are Le Repos du Guerrier (1958), Les Petits Enfants du Siècle (1961) and Les Stances à Sophie (1963). They have all been translated into English, with the titles Warrior’s Rest, Children of Heaven and Cats Don’t Care for Money. I have looked into the last of these, made by Helen Eustis and recently published by Doubleday, and was surprised to find how good it was. I had supposed that the novel was untranslatable. But Miss Eustis has not been daunted by the bad language, the Paris argot or the sardonic hipster cracks; she has found American equivalents, and the book reads with perfect naturalness. These novels are three studies of women, each from a different milieu, in every case told by the woman herself and each in her own idiom, which is sometimes, like the point of view, extremely tough. I cannot think of anything to compare them to except such a novel of Dawn Powell’s as Angels on Toast, in which the antics of advertizing men are mostly seen from their women’s point of view, or Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me, in which a hard-boiled young charmer from New York describes her adventures in England. The second and third, at least, of Mlle Rochefort’s novels are not only very amusing but also to be taken seriously as studies of contemporary France.
The first of these, Le Repos du Guerrier, has interested me the least. The narrator is a young woman of the bourgeoisie who has inherited a little property. She falls in love with a brash but attractive man, ten years older, who proves to be an incurable alcoholic. He lives on her, humiliates her, torments her, estranges her from her friends and family, and resists her attempts to reform him. She finally leaves him in a clinic, with no real hope for his recovery. One gets bored by his outrageousness and worthlessness, and by the woman’s masochistic loyalty. It is explained on the back of the jacket that they are typical of the postwar world. He, having fought in the Second War, has no longer any vocation or ambition; she “belongs to a generation which has not even learned to hope, which knows of nothing better than Personal Happiness, nor of any other love than personal possessive love, enjoyed in a happy security.” But in the novel itself nothing is made of all this. The title has been used for a film featuring Brigitte Bardot. I have not seen this film, but I cannot imagine that it had much in common with the novel. The heroine does not resemble in any respect the types played by Brigitte Bardot.
The heroine of Les Petits Enfants du Siècle is the daughter of a fairly well-paid factory worker who describes his occupation as “making a fool of himself all day filling cubes with a lot of nasty mustard.” The sole aim of the parents’ lives is to acquire the new household devices: le frigo, la machine à laver, la télé, and, of course, la voiture. (The corresponding acquisitions of the young are la moto and le scooter.) The parents have as many children as possible because every baby brings a bonus which will enable them to get something new. The narrator is the eldest daughter, Jo. She is obliged to take care of her sisters and brothers, which include a set of twins. One of these children is sickly, another is feebleminded, one of the boys is a delinquent and goes to jail. Jo, who is the ablest and brightest, is always carrying on in her own mind a bitterly sarcastic commentary. One of her most devastating soliloquies takes place on a trip to market, when she observes the matrons of the neighborhood all in different stages of pregnancy. A woman who has already acquired a mixer and a fur rug pats her belly and boasts, “And my Frigidaire is here!” “In order to get our Frigidaire,” Jo reflects, “we’d have to have triplets at least.” Another woman, five weeks behind the first, gives her rival a mean look. “And I’ll even get to the washing machine.” “We’ve got that already,” says the other. “A long time ago. In my belief, it’s the most important thing in the house. For the laundry,” she makes it quite clear. This woman’s children were always boys, of which she is very proud. “She could furnish all by herself,” thinks Jo, “an execution platoon for the fatherland; it’s true that the fatherland would have paid her in advance, as was right. I was hoping there would be a war in good time to make use of all this material, which would otherwise not be much good, because they were all complete nitwits. I thought of the day when they would say ‘En avant!’ to all of the Mauvin boys, and bang, they’d all lie dead on the battlefield, and a cross would be planted over them: here fell Mauvin TV, Mauvin Jalopy, Mauvin Frigidaire, Mauvin Mixer, Mauvin Carpet, Mauvin Pressure Cooker, and with the pension they would get they could afford a vacuum cleaner and a family vault.”
Jo is overworked, loudly disdainful. She has never known any affection except from one of her little brothers till she attracts an Italian workman who is employed in building construction. This man becomes genuinely fond of her and initiates a love affair, but when her father’s factory shuts down in August, she has to go with the rest of the family for a vacation in a country hotel, travelling in the new car, to the tune of much weeping and quarrelling, because the father is a very bad driver. When she gets back, the buildings are finished and the workmen have gone away. She is desolated, and takes to going out with other teen-agers into the woods, but though all the boys will lend her their scooters, she is longing still for her Guido, and, hearing that Italian workers are now employed by a new housing project, she goes to look for him there. She does not find him, but is enchanted by the suburb. “Ça c’était de la Cité, de la vraie Cité de l’Avenir! Sur des kilomètres et des kilomètres et des kilomètres, des maisons, des maisons, des maisons. Pareilles. Alignées. Blanches.” Rue Paul-Valéry, Rue Mallarmé, Rue Victor-Hugo, Rue Paul-Claudel. A playground, a library, new shops “in the middle of each rectangle of houses so that each bonne femme has the same number of steps to take to go to buy her noodles.” Then Mr. Right comes along. Jo’s mother has just produced another set of twins, bringing the children to the number of eleven. She is asked whether she is going to complete the dozen. But she now has double phlebitis and cannot attend to the babies. Jo and her father take the new twins to the hospital. The babies are there found extremely cute, and people ask which is Caroline and which is Isabelle, but neither Jo nor her father knows. Jo sees a blond young man admiring her, and later he makes her acquaintance. He is un monteur de télévisions. They go for walks in the woods. When she tells him that she is pregnant, he is quite ecstatic: he first saw her with a baby in her arms, and a baby by her is just what he has longed for. They get married, and she suggests that they might go to live in that new suburb which she has thought so heavenly. For her, it is the next step up in technological civilization.
The narrator of Le Repos du Guerrier is an educated woman who writes good French. The narrator of Les Petits Enfants is talking her story in the language that she would use if she were telling it to a friend. The author is trying to escape from the literary fashions of French fiction and to show us what life in modern Paris is really like for the ordinary people submerged in it. She continues this in Les Stances à Sophie, on a higher social level. This is, I think, the best of her books up to date. The heroine of Les Stances à Sophie is a clever independent girl. Céline, who leads a bohemian life, wears her hair short, prefers slacks to dresses and talks the wisecracking slang of Paris. She has a genuine passion for a bourgeois young man who, against her better instincts, puts such pressure on her, threatening to give her up, that, after going through a kind of nervous breakdown brought on by her reluctance to forfeit her freedom, she finally consents to marry him. But she finds that his conventional family drive her to malicious revolt: outrageous opinions, bad language. When she is asked what she was doing before she married, she tells them—although not truthfully—that she was une strip-teaseuse. She continues—despite her husband’s disapproval—to wear slacks and not let her hair grow long. He begs her not to say merde so often. His friends—les jeunes ménages—are as bad as his family. They entertain one another, play poker and go out to boîtes together. None of these couples has children. Husbands and wives are in general faithful, but occasionally one of the men tries making a pass at Céline. In this case, she simply tells him to go look in the glass or arranges to have her husband find out about it, with the result that he will quarrel with his friend. For this group, the frequenting of strip tease shows is “notre petit libertinage, avec filet…Une façon de rester prudes tout en se donnant des airs.” The couples I saw at Les Folies Pigalle seemed exactly to answer this description, as did those, three or four of them together, that we would see at such restaurants as La Tour d’Argent. So many of the features of the new modern Paris by which we had already been struck are touched upon in this book: the Spanish servants who do not know French; le living, which has taken the place of le salon; the bad air (Céline predicts that a certain number of babies will have to die before the city does anything about it); the indifference of the people in the shops and the increasing standardization and ugliness of the goods they have to sell. Céline sets out to buy some curtains but cannot find the material she wants. “ ‘I want some cotton voile, but not dotted Swiss.’ ‘They don’t make that kind, Madame.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because this is the way they make it, Madame.’ ‘And why is it made like this?’ (She’s beginning to get sore.) ‘There’s no demand for it, Madame.’ ‘But am I not asking for it?’ No, that won’t get me anywhere: there’s no demand for it, so I who am asking for it must not exist. They deny that I exist. They’re just waiting for me to go away. A subtle strategy for turning people into sheep. I’ll have no curtains if I go on like this. Or else I’ll have to give in—then they’ll have got the better of me; they’re strong. They’ve decided that this year my saucepans will be tangerine, turquoise or dove’s-neck—just like the other ladies’.”
But after her first phase of resistance Céline decides to play it the other way. She will go in for wifemanship; she will impersonate the perfect wife. She wears all the right things; “Je ne dis pas ‘merde’ en public.” She becomes a great success as a hostess, and learns to pay no attention to the monotonous conversation of the men but to study their expressions and their tones of voice, as if she were an anthropologist. Céline’s husband works on the municipal plan in the Department of Decentralization, and his closest friend also works on it in the Department of Regroupment. Like the vacationers of Les Petits Enfants du Siècle on their lower social level, these husbands of the young marrieds talk most of the time about cars, and they are engaged in a feverish rivalry. When they go on their vacations, their great idea is to race one another. Céline and her husband pass a smashed-up car, with people standing around it, but do not stop to find out what has happened. When they get to their destination, they learn that this car was that of their friends. The wife is dead and the husband has six broken ribs. This has been his eleventh accident. Céline, out of sheer boredom, having completely lost interest in her husband, has been having a Lesbian affair with the wife. She goes to see the husband’s friend in the hospital and brutally bawls him out.
Now her husband decides to run for Deputy. He abandons what he has imagined to be his radicalism in order to get in with the winning group. He tells Céline to make herself attractive and buys her a lot of new clothes. But she feels that he is behaving like a pimp. She has in the meantime met an old lover, who is organizing a chain of strip-tease joints. He has asked her to supply him with new ideas for acts, and she finds that her clever mind is “a veritable fountain” of such ideas. She realizes that she cannot face playing the role of a conservative Deputy’s wife, and when she comes to feel reasonably sure that her husband will be elected, she writes him a letter and leaves, explaining that the new clothes he has bought her are for the future “Députée.” She can count on being paid for her work on the strip-tease show, to which she is now adding the duties of hostess, and takes a room in her old apartment house. She brushes off a would-be lover. “I breathe again. At last. Alone.”
The title of Les Stances à Sophie is likely to mystify the foreign reader, since there is no one named Sophie in the novel. But Les Stances à Sophie is well known in France as an extremely dirty chanson de corps de garde, which deals with the misfortunes of a man who picks up a disgusting and degrading woman. The first line of the song is the epigraph of the novel: “Quand jt’ai rencontrée, un soir dans la rue,” etc., and the third line of this stanza is what she and her friend imagine her husband will be saying to himself: “Ah, si j’avais su que tu n’étais qu’une grue!”
Bibliothèque Nationale. I had not been in the Bibliothèque Nationale since the summer of 1921, when I was trying to find some biographical information about the novelist Octave Mirbeau. The materials offered were extremely meager, and it turned out to be so hard to get anywhere with the antiquated library system that I had never been able to bring myself to look anything up there again. I now wanted some information about a figure of the same period, the caricaturist Sem, a great admiration of mine, whose albums I had been collecting. These albums are almost never dated, and the names of the people caricatured are almost never given, though occasionally someone has written them in. I was expecting a bibliography and hoping for perhaps a key. But what was supposed to be the great library of France turned out to be just as antiquated and just as unsatisfactory as it had been forty years ago.
You have to get a pass, in the first place, to be admitted to the building at all. But this was the least of my difficulties. Inside, I asked one of the snippy old ladies by whom the place seemed largely to be staffed where I could find Sem’s albums and information about him. “Il faut choisir,” she enjoined. Couldn’t I see them both? “Pas la même fois.” I consulted the catalogue and discovered, to my astonishment, that the entries had never been typed but were still being written out in an old-fashioned early-nineteenth-century hand, to keep up the tradition of which, I reflected, they must now have to train special scribes. And these entries have not been arranged all in one alphabetical catalogue but are divided up into sections, each of which is supposed to cover books published between certain dates, and I was informed by a frequenter of the library that titles were often assigned to the wrong years. I found only one entry for Sem. I was told to make out two slips. When I handed them in at the desk, the old frustrator presiding there snapped at me with “Comment voulez-vous que j’accepte des fiches au crayon?,” so I had to borrow a pen and make out another pair. I was then given information which must have been intentionally misleading, for I was told to go up to the third floor. This involved climbing a high marble staircase, getting sidetracked in an exhibition of the manuscripts and portraits of Alfred de Vigny, for which I had to pay two francs, and making my way through long marble corridors till I finally discovered an elevator, by which I ascended to more marble corridors, and found myself at last confronted by the door of the print department. I inquired of a young man, who told me to go down to the ground floor. I explained that I had been told to come up there. He called up the reading room to check, then said yes, I must go below. There I handed in my slips and was directed to a numbered seat, to which presently my single item was brought by a very old man. It was an article of about five pages, written by a friend of Sem’s at the time of the latter’s death. The albums, I was now told, were kept in the print department, from which I had just come. I went above again, and the helpful young man got them out, but there were only four or five of them—whereas I had myself a great many. He could throw no light on the dates; he explained that there was no bibliography of Sem.
A woman friend whom I told about this had had an even more discouraging experience and had eventually become so intimidated that she had precipitately escaped from the library, leaving her winter coat. She could not bring herself to go back again, and her husband had had to retrieve it. Now, it is not perhaps a bad idea to scrape the crust off the old buildings in Paris, but if a cultural overhauling is going on, why isn’t something done about the Bibliothèque Nationale? France at the present moment is constantly asserting her title to the cultural hegemony of Europe and implying that the other peoples are all barbarians, but the facilities for study in France seem in every way to be wretched. This winter a student riot, caused by the overcrowded classrooms and the deficient equipment of the Sorbonne, was broken up by police clubbings.