Chronicles and bulletins of Jean Guérin

Some chronicles and short news from Jean Guérin in the NRF. The pseudonym Jean Guérin covers several authors but the vast majority of chronicles and short news are written by Jean Paulhan.

Book review

A review cannot extend beyond its program, nor comment on what is clear, nor discuss what it approves, nor repeat (even regarding a good book) what it has said elsewhere. So as not to omit important works, we offer certain judgments in the most condensed form.

Pierre Mac-Orlan: The Midnight Tradition

At the very moment when Noël-le-Caïd's body is discovered, a mysterious call brings together several bizarre individuals in the crime house: a little rumpled singer, a forty-year-old with the head of a blond rat, a salivating and red-faced worker, a journalist with the skin of a platypus. All that remains is to discover the assassin among these shady characters.
Mac-Orlan goes about it with ill will. From the hundredth page, the singer marries the blond rat and we forget the assassination. But we do not forget the strange atmosphere of half-daylight, of cold light, which Mac-Orlan may well introduce tomorrow into metaphysics or astronomy, as he introduces it today into the detective novel.

(Surrealists): Au grand jour

By Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Pierre Unik (Editions Surrealists).

It is only a question of clarifying the moral attitude of the surrealists. The five letters, of which Au broad day is composed, are addressed to non-communist surrealists:

If, in its development, Surrealism tried to reduce, by still unusual means, the various antinomies that the process of the real world entails, it only found the reduction of these antinomies in the idea of Revolution... Whatever you may think of the effectiveness, not of communist action, but of the attitude of a man who, at the end of his cause, submits to this action, nothing, neither the taste for independence, nor Heroism, nor disrespect for the laws (and, for example, in all its beauty, desertion in times of war), are capable of throwing us back towards anarchy.

to Paul Nougé and Camille Goeman, directors of Correspondance:

You stuck to a mysticism of advertising, of insinuation, of the disqualification of each person by their own means, finally of all falsifications. A certain necessary defeatism has never seemed sufficient to us.

to Marcel Fourrier; to Pierre Naville, editors-in-chief of Clarté:

Having only intended to provide Clarity with a literary part, would have been wasting your effort with us: literary work is a dirty job that we have never undertaken anywhere.

to the communists:

It is painful that the organization of the PC in France does not allow it to use us in a sphere where we can really make ourselves useful and that no other decision has been taken with regard to us than to report us almost everywhere as suspects. It is well known that, on other grounds, we have always accepted the battle. The one to which we want to resolve, given the impossibility for us to consider communists as our adversaries, we can only refuse it. In this case, we will regretfully wait for better days, those during which the Revolution will have to recognize its own.

Antonin Artaud: At the big night

Antonin Artaud replies to the surrealists:

Is there still a surrealist adventure and didn't surrealism die the day Breton and his followers believed they had to rally to communism and seek in the domain of facts and immediate matter, the outcome of an action which could normally only take place in the intimate frameworks of the brain.

and:

Any spiritual action, if it is right, materializes when necessary. The inner conditions of the soul! but they carry with them their clothing of stone, of true action. This is an irremissibly implied fact.

A single conviction remains common to the surrealists and their most violent adversaries: hatred or contempt for literature. And certainly there is more than one man who realized, and experienced, such feelings better than the surrealists. But at the same time he forbade himself to speak. Everyone here knows their own. The fact remains that perhaps no one expressed this contempt and hatred more stubbornly than the surrealists.
More stubbornly: in a more varied way, more lively, more literary if you like. Never mind. Even though they deal with communism, it is in the field of literature that the surrealists first raise the question. This is the terrain that, for them, it is a question of fleeing.
We know well that this is also their deep weakness. It is commonplace to breathe; it is as ridiculous to breathe regularly as it is to get dressed every morning and undress every evening. But there is one way to avoid this ridicule or stupidity: it is to manage to breathe regularly enough so that you no longer need to pay attention to it. And if we happen to admire, without reservation, some writer, it is also because he has not stopped short of despising literature, but has in himself completed it, surpassed it and reduced it in some way to being only a function, only the means of an activity which goes beyond it and which surpasses him. - But this is where all the questions remain asked. - There is perhaps some weakness in not asking them.

Correspondence

I apologize for publishing the following two letters. They do not relate, whatever it may seem, to a personal quarrel. The question is whether we can successfully attempt against the N.R.F. a blackmail, which would seem very ridiculous and improbable, if we did not know that it has already succeeded elsewhere.
As innocuous as it was, Jean Guérin's last note earned us, from the surrealists, several letters of insults and threats: the first, the main one, was from André Breton.
J.P.

To Mr. Jean Paulhan, Paris, October 10, 1927.

Dear friend,

You kindly asked us to request explanations from Mr. André Breton regarding a letter from him, which you considered offensive.
We presented ourselves this morning to Mr. André Breton who told us that he refused to be witnesses and to fight.
In these conditions, we consider our mission to be complete and ask you to find here our most friendly feelings.
Benjamin Cremieux
Marcel Arland

To Mr. Benjamin Crémieux,
to Mr. Marcel Arland.

Dear friends,

THANKS. I have not disturbed you in vain; We now know what cowardice lies behind the violence and filthiness of this character.

Jean Paulhan

Correspondence

n°186, March 1929

_We received the following letter from a new subscriber:

January 10, 1929.
Mr Director,
As an avid reader of Action Française, I have always found clear and precise ideas there on political men and events.
Unfortunately, the same is not true when it comes to literature. I had barely purchased the works of Anatole France, the good teacher of Mr. Charles Maurras, when Mr. Léon Daudet strongly advised me against reading this “lewd and nihilistic pedant”. Should I consider, like Mr. Daudet, Paul Valéry a “poor boy”? or, like Mr. Maurras, for one of the great poets of our time? Proust seems to Mr. Daudet a great moralist and to Mr. Dubech an illegible cacographer. Renan disgusts Mr. Daudet; Mr. Bainville admires him to the point of writing little tales, which Renan would not have hesitated to sign. Albert Thibaudet, who is very mistreated by the literary page of the A.F., is chosen as critic at the bottom of Candide, a weekly which politically thinks very well. Mr. Bainville speaks with praise of Paul Souday, whom Mr. Daudet very wittily calls Sulphate of Souday. And here we have just brought into the house a Mr. Robert the Devil, who speaks of Abel Hermant, about whom Mr. Daudet made us laugh so much, as a great writer. You finally know what their disdain is today for Mr. Jacques Maritain in whom I had become accustomed, on the faith of Mr. Daudet, to see the greatest philosopher of our time; as for Mr. Georges Valois who was, a few years ago, the light of the social economy, he is nothing more than an incoherent and obscure scoundrel. Remembering an article where Mr. Léon Daudet recommended reading the Nouvelle Revue Française, I would be grateful if you would sign up for a three-month trial subscription, hoping to find in your literary review the certainty and calm that the Action Française provides me in another field.
Please accept…
Bar-le-Duc, Jeanne Magnat

We found ourselves quite embarrassed to respond to this letter.
The Action Française has in fact just denounced, with its usual vivacity, the literary anarchy for which the N.R.F is, according to it, solely responsible; a new magazine, Latinité, was tasked with restoring order. We could only thank Ms. J. Magnat for her trust, and advise her to read Latinité carefully.
It also seems that Madame Magnat is exaggerating, and that agreement is very close to being reached at the A.F., on a few writers. This is how the Literary Page of February 7 tells us that we have in Mr. Abel Bonnard “one of the most authentic descendants of our great moralists, in whom the activity of thought resembles a perpetual blossoming ”. A charming man, moreover, and who “we invite a lot into the world…; Distant travel, the dealings with intelligent and beautiful women, the care given to two or three choice male friendships fill the hours that this writer does not devote to his work.
Mr. Abel Bonnard is, as we know, the author of a collection of rhymes on domestic animals, and of some pleasant reflections on friendship.

THE GREAT GAME

The Great Game quite violently forbids us, from its first page, to pass an “artistic or literary” judgment on it. We wouldn't have thought of it. But it is very true that there is an order of research or concerns, without which literature is only a rather mediocre joke. It is to these concerns, to these researches, that MM. Gilbert-Lecomte, René Daumal, Rolland de Renéville and their friends, with a seriousness and, if we can say so, an innocence which allows us to expect more than one discovery from the Grand Jeu. If we had to specify their common faith, their “starting” convictions, we would find something like this:
Science and positive thinking have gone bankrupt. Man realizes today that there are only occult facts, the most occult of which could well be thought. Mr. René Daumal asks his readers the following “head-scratching questions”:

However, Mr. Gilbert-Lecomte attempts to specify the features and conditions of the revolt which will rid us, once and for all, of the apparent universe:

There remains poetry, the only means given to us to communicate with essential reality from now on.
Revolt, occultism, poetry, such is the lesson that Mr. Rolland de Renéville draws from the work of Rimbaud, to whom the second number of the Grand Jeu is dedicated. And I don't know if the reconstruction he attempts, of Rimbaud's kabbalist and occultist readings at the Charleville library, is entirely accurate. More than one doctrine, which Mr. Rolland de Renéville attributes to the wise men of India, could well come simply from the madmen of German romanticism. It doesn't matter: never before has Season in Hell been commented on with more love and accuracy. Let us impatiently await the issues devoted to mystics, the "unity of dreams" and "social movements", which the Great Game promises us.

Tzara: The Approximate Man

We are surprised to discover in these poems, clearer than necessary, bric-a-brac, ankles, swelling. The best that can be said of Tristan Tzara is that he sometimes resembles Victor Hugo's worst moments.

Jung: Metamorphoses and symbols of the libido

Jung attempts to explain, through the survival of archaic myths, the troubles and anxieties of an American woman these days.
The subject is therefore fascinating; but the demonstration so light that one repents enough quickly to have found the subject fascinating.

For a table of poetry in France

La Nouvelle Revue Française intends to devote the majority of its September 1933 issue to a table of poetry in France.
To this end, she asks all French poets – the still unknown poet no less than the famous poet; to workers and peasants, as well as to intellectuals and bourgeois; professionals as well as Sunday poets – to send him unpublished poems.
It is essential that each poem or collection of poems be accompanied by a detailed notice in which the author indicates his name, his age, his profession, the origin of his political vocation and the reasons for his attachment to poetry. The gravity, authenticity and precision of such testimony will be no less taken into account, for the final choice that will be made, than the specific value of the poems.
The poems and testimonies retained, the number of which cannot be less than 60, will not be subject to any classification.

Conversations

Your postman, without being asked, deplores the fact that Charlot, Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd are Jewish. He adds that, for him, he has never stopped being anti-Semitic, and that more than one factor is of his opinion. Good. A lawyer nods his head and tells you that Mr. Maast was very wrong to marry an Israelite, because of the children later. Everyone knows that the last elections of the Order (that of lawyers) were held on the Jewish question. This is an anti-Semitism that is poorly admitted, but pervasive, and which comes out everywhere.
A doctor, who until then had limited himself to wisely praising Mr. Déat, suddenly tells you that if poor people are poor people, it is because they have chosen to be so. “We must feed the people,” he said, “so that they can live. You also have to treat him harshly, to satisfy his complex.”
We recognized the inferiority complex. This is how science and fashion agree, and we would be wrong to forget that Nazism is, since the war, the greatest popular movement we have seen in Europe.
This is an observation, of course. It's not a compliment. And we know how popular movements end: with popular wars.

Armadillos

We can see, for a few more days, four armadillos at the Oisellerie du Bon Marché. Seen from behind, they are reminiscent of a turtle transforming into a fan; from the front, they look more like an infinitely enlarged louse. Although their expression is benevolent, most passers-by find these admirable animals hideous. The merchant assures that they are easily tamed, and follow their master, uttering light joyful cries.

G. Bergmann: The Arc among the Botocudos

It seems likely, according to the texts and documents collected by Mr. Bergmann, that the war of 1575 (which devastated, as we know, Southern Botocudia), was caused by the excessive greed of the merchants of bows and poisoned arrows.
We would need many monographs of this order, and we cannot praise the Scheveningen faculty of letters enough for having accepted a subject whose topicality is obvious.

Ernest Hemingway: To have and have not

Curious melodrama, where Hemingway persists, why? to play the profound psychologist.

Explanations

The last issue of the NRF earned us more than one criticism. […]
We are told that the Little Dictionary is a zaniness, worthy of the Vermot Almanac.
It is true that the Dictionary is fun; but nothing prevents us from taking it seriously. Meillet used to say, in agreement with all linguists, that words are arbitrary, and that absolutely nothing intended this or that to evoke a given meaning. He added that this scientific notion of the arbitrariness of the word comes up against stubborn prejudices in us; and that nothing less would be necessary to impose it than to forge and spread an absurd, but probable, dictionary.
This is done.

Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Alternative

Here finally is a dialectical thought nourished by the finest psychology, which is more concerned with posing problems than to solve them and does not fear any traps of current events.

Louis Jouvet: Reflections of the actor

Jouvet did not want to imitate so many writers, who deal with what they do not know not – nor so many people who are not, who speak like writers. The result is truly admirable: the theater comes out brand new, Hugo and Beaumarchais renewed, Becque and the theater directors definitely stunned.

Ch. De Gaulle: France and its army

The armies of France are victorious "each time it has been able to take upon itself to chase away his chimeras". Let's put it more simply: every time the French believe in France.

Jean Dutourd: Au Bon Beurre

Mythology for all, petty bourgeois donjuanism, first philosophy, the apotheosis of a filthy creamery, these are as many subjects as Jean Dutourd treats, in an elegant style, with brilliance, abundance, casualness. With success. And what more? We timidly hope that one day he will have something to say, which is close to his heart.

Paul Éluard

It is a political tribute to Paul Éluard that the magazine Europe (July-August) pays. We do not meet a single one of the poet's first friends there: those who for twenty years recognized him, loved him, placed their trust in him and gave him confidence in himself. Not one of his essential friends: neither André Breton, nor Philippe Soupault; nor for that matter René Char; nor even (why?) Aragon. But we see Yves Farge, Henri Martin, Claude Morgan, Simone Téry who gives the title to his article:

WE HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN HIM

(Not at all. It was around 1933 that Mme Téry met Éluard), Fernand Gregh who strangely wrote:

I salute in the work of Paul Éluard this taste for humanity which I for my part tried to translate in my own way.

And of course, at the top of the Homage (at the top!) a nice but a little ridiculous speech from Mr. Jacque Duclos:

In other times, we could have talked about the great Resistance fighter, the great Frenchman, but in these times of conspiracy against the freedom of citizens, against the independence of the Fatherland and against Peace, there are words that our leaders and the police officers in their service do not like to hear...

The opposite is true. The Resistance and the Homeland are highly recommended subjects these days — precisely recommended by our Governments. But political eloquence is satisfied with little: a few lies. And overall, it is still annoying to hear Paul Éluard praised by people who have good intentions but who would not even have opened his books or would have considered them ridiculous if Éluard had not joined the Communist Party.
Let's leave it at that. We also find in this tribute moving, moving memories of Georges Sadoul, beautiful pages by Jean Lescure and Claude Roy, notes by André Spire; an essay by Gaston Bachelard.

Bulletin

  👉🏿  The Disque vert led by Hellens and Solier, reappears in Brussels. Large success and long life to the Disque vert!
  👉🏿  Orgosolo (Sardinia). The inhabitants, having sworn on the cross to no longer kill each other, slaughter a hundred kids for the banquet of reconciliation.
  👉🏿  Picasso's portrait of Stalin is "categorically disapproved" by the PC. Disapproved at the same time, Aragon who published it in French Letters.

Mythologies

Les Lettres Nouvelles publishes each month a Little Mythology by Roland Barthes. Where are denounced:
the myth of royalty:

Kings are defined by the purity of the race (blue blood), like puppies, and the ship – the Greek yacht the Agamemnon – privileged place of all enclosure, is a sort of modern ark where the main varieties of the monarchical species are preserved. […]

The myth of the flood which is part of the celebration (cars reduced to their roofs, street lamps floating, houses cut into pieces), of the slide (boats walking in the streets), and even:

Threatening Paris, the flood was even able to wrap itself a little in the forty-eighter myth: the Parisians raised “barricades”, they defended their city with the help of paving stones against the enemy river. […] It was nobler than the pumping of the cellars, from which the newspapers were not able to get much traction. […] It was better to develop the image of an armed mobilization, […] the rescue “of children, the old and the sick”, the biblical bringing in of the flocks, all this Noah fever filling the Ark. Because the Ark is a happy myth: humanity distances itself from the elements there, it concentrates there and develops the necessary awareness of its powers, bringing out from misfortune itself the evidence that the world is manageable.

The myth of the Negro (Bichon), the myth of the avant-garde (Jean-Louis Barrault and The Dream of Prisoners), the myth of the liberal Church (Charlot and Abbé Pierre), and even the “Rimbaud myth”, which is an opportunity for Barthes to suddenly reconcile himself with myths.

Listening to Rimbaud, absorbing Rimbaud, finding the real _Rimbaud, finally seems to me less human than considering Rimbaud eaten by men, by those of real History, and not those of the literary empyrean. It might be time for Literary News to take sides: there is no eternity to Literature other than its own mythology.

But perhaps Barthes will one day tell us what is not a myth. So far, his explanations on this point remain a little vague. “The human,” he readily says (but what human?), or: “the dialectic of love” (?). Or again – addressing drama critics:

_But, if we fear or despise its philosophical foundations so much in a work, and if we so strongly demand the right to understand nothing about it and not to talk about it, why be critical? Understanding and enlightening is your job. […] You do not want to understand the Marxist Lefebvre's play, but be sure that the Marxist Lefebvre understands your incomprehension perfectly well, and above all (because I believe you are more devious than uneducated) the admission you make of it.

After all, perhaps Mr. Roland Barthes is simply a Marxist. What does he say?

Paul Éluard: Natural course

The briefer Éluard makes it, the better he is... He is excellent here: the modern Petrarch.

Édith Boissonnas

Édith Boissonnas is confusing. She doesn't look like any of the models that serve today's critics to recognize the presence of poetry: René Char, Paul Éluard, Pierre-Jean Jouve. As confusing as could have been, around 1909, Apollinaire. But this voice, which we never had heard, is nevertheless strong and mature, strangely assured. [...]

Mr. Barthes gets angry

Quoting the other month, with great esteem, some extracts from the Petite Mythologie (Les Lettres nouvelles), I noticed that Mr. Roland Barthes, who informs us at length about what he considers mythical (Abbé Pierre, the dramatic avant-garde, the kings, Rimbaud, the army, the Church, the "style" and the rest), was not thinking of any moment to teach us what he considers to be non-mythical: to be real. It is at most that he happens in this sense to evoke (a little solemnly) the “man”, the “human” or the “dialectics of love” (sic). Which man? Which human? What dialectic? They don't tell us anything about it. And I asked him, just by chance, if he understood these words in the Marxist sense. It was an innocent question, and I could just as easily have asked him if he meant them in the Nietzschean or Bergsonian sense. It was even a kind and flattering question, because certain passages from Mr. Barthes would rather lead us to believe that he means nothing at all by man and by human. But Mr. Barthes was not sensitive to the praise. He responds to me with humor (Lettres nouvelles, July–August):

Quoting in the June NRF some extracts from these mythologies, Mr. Jean Guérin calls on me (sic) to say whether I am a Marxist or not. _Deep down, what does that matter to Mr. Guérin? These kinds of questions usually only interest McCarthyists. Others still prefer to judge on evidence. Let Mr. Guérin do like them. Let him read Marx, for example.

With humor, but also with a kind of worry. What did we do to him, what is he afraid of?
I fear, to tell the truth, that Mr. Barthes, who is good at grammar, is rather weak at history. Particularly in contemporary history. Otherwise he would know like everyone else that the Third and Fourth Republic, if they lacked McCarthys, never lacked Marxists.
Viviani was a Marxist, and Briand. Millerand was a Marxist and Pierre Laval, who said in 1914 to one of his adversaries (as does Mr. Barthes): “you would do better to read Marx.” Léon Blum was a Marxist (with certain reservations). Thorez was, he still is. As we see, French Marxists have generally become ministers, presidents of the Council, presidents of the Republic. As for the persecuted, the proscribed, the locked up, they were not Marxists. They even hated Marxism: Vallès, Blanqui, Barbès, all the Communards, closer to us Jean Grave or Fénéon. Of the two great socialists of 1911, one, Guesde, was a pure Marxist: he ended up minister of state. The other, Jaurès, was anti-Marxist. He was murdered. A few days ago I heard about a book that would be burned at the stake: no, it is not a Marxist book; of a writer who sees himself brought to justice for his ideas: no, it is not Mr. Barthes that we are talking about. Mr. Barthes is well regarded by bourgeois society which, unless I am mistaken, gives him subsidies. In 15 years, in all likelihood, he will be Minister of National Education. He will not be a bad minister. But let him not come and do it to us with persecution. It would be in questionable taste. Let him study the McCarthy myth instead.
Mr. Roland Barthes says again:

_In matters of literature, reading is a more objective method than investigation: thus, it is enough for me to read the NRF to recognize its perfectly reactionary character; I don't need any statement on this subject.

And obviously he means it sincerely. He thinks so. It is a rather curious fact that Progressives in general see the NRF as a reactionary magazine, but Conservatives see it as a revolutionary magazine.
It was not a fault on our part to explain what was going on. It is possible that Mr. Barthes has not read our explanations; it is also possible that he read them without understanding anything. No, we won't do it again.

The soap bubble making machine

We could believe for a moment that the soap bubble machine, long desired, would finally see the light of day. Mounted rings on stems, which the peddlers of our boulevards sell, are, in fact, capable of producing, in a single breath, some thirty to forty bubbles. He seems that they owe this property to their ribbed and rough edges, which it looks like sandpaper.
Unfortunately, discovery, by industrializing, loses part of its quality. The new rings, which can be found on the market, are elastic, ovoid in shape, smaller than the old ones, and do not give hardly more than five to ten bubbles at a time. So that number of amateurs have decided to return to the pipe, the paper cone or the straw of their childhood. We can't blame them.
It must also be admitted that the bibliography of the subject has hardly been enriched since the excellent treatise of Benjamin Fiolle (1767) and the work of Tray. We will nevertheless read with pleasure, despite the slightly childish tone, the Book of Soap Bubbles, by Catherine Gay (Albin Michel, 1951). This little essay contains excellent advice regarding bubble holders, soap figures and the multiplication of crazy bubbles. We already knew that he just mix a few drops of glycerin with the soapy water to obtain elastic and durable bubbles. But Ms. Gay seems unaware that a little oil makes them bigger. It seemed to me otherwise part that she exaggerated, with a very feminine sensitivity, the repulsion what the bubbles feel towards ammonia. Finally, Ms. Gay does not hold does not take into account liquid soaps or the bubble machine, which he has was questioned above.

E. Herrigel: Zen in the art of archery (Derain, in Lyon)

How can man reach the point where it is no longer he, but "something in him" which shoots the arrow (so that the archer does not find himself more distinct from the target) such is the teaching that a brave philosopher German went to ask a Japanese archery master. He put a little more than five years to obtain it. Here he recounts his experience in a manner meticulous, and sometimes convincing.

Antonin Artaud: The Tarahumaras (The Crossbow)

Antonin Artaud was not a man to settle for cheap. Nor the well-being of proletariat, nor mad love seemed to him less derisory objects than those who excited the verve of André Breton. Endlessly surreal. No one has probably seen the “Great Transparencies” more closely.
We know that he went to Mexico to look for them. We must be grateful to Paule Thévenin and Marc Barbezat for joining the Rite of Peyote and the Taharumaras the letters to Henri Parisot, to Balthus, to Dr Allendy, and the text of the three conferences on Surrealism given at the University of Mexico.

Bulletin

  👉🏿  It's an unfortunate resemblance to the grotesque Dudule (from comedies of Mack Sennett) which seems to have led to the condemnation by the P.C. of Picasso's Stalin.
Pilot Enrique Bernal, who dropped the first bomb atomic bombing on Hiroshima, is ordained priest at the monastery of Castro Urdiales.

Politics

It seems that recent events have led, at least among intellectuals, to a sort of dislocation of political parties. More than one revolutionary condemns, with Sartre, the massacres in Budapest and separates from the Communist Party. More than one reactionary condemns, with Bertrand de Jouvenel, the Algerian war and the Suez expedition. Albert Béguin and J.-M. Domenach themselves attack progressivism quite violently. However, Raymond Aron proposed for his part that France withdraw from Algeria not only its army, but all its nationals. A certain dismay ensues.

J.-P. Sartre observes in L'Express:

_In general, popular revolutions take place on the left. For the first time, we witnessed a political revolution that moved to the right.

Roger Hagnauer writes in the Proletarian Revolution (Nov.):

For a few days, we felt incapable of thinking.

And Gabriel Marcel, in the French Nation:

However derisory, however indecent any word may be...

However, no one gives up speaking, and Sartre's explanations take up eight newspaper columns.

Politics again

We really want to say to Sartre, to Béguin and to Domenach, to Claude Roy and to Roger Vailland: “Why are you only now seeing what has been staring us all in the face for a long time?” It has been 10 years since Albert Camus, David Rousset and Raymond Aron showed you resurgent anti-Semitism, injustices and massacres. Because finally, as Silone points out in his response to Sartre (L'Express, no. 283), these are ordinary procedures of the Russian state:

Neither the total destruction, between 1925 and 1940, of the revolutionary elite, nor the extermination of five federated peoples, nor the slavery in forced labor camps of 12 to 15 million men proceeded by any method other than the massacre of the Hungarian Soviets.

This is to which Sartre responded in advance that the truth is not always good to tell and that we must in any case avoid revealing it to people who are dying of hunger – that the end justifies the means, and that the establishment of a socialist republic deserved some killings – finally, that the denunciation of Stalin's crimes was “an enormous mistake” of Khrushchev. In short, he plays Machiavelli.
He adds:

If Raymond Aron is satisfied to see his predictions confirmed by events, it is because he has a strong heart.

However, there is nothing to suggest that Raymond Aron is satisfied. It's quite the contrary. But the remark is curious. It roughly means: “There are cases where we do not have to congratulate ourselves on having been right.” And as a result: “There are cases where we can be proud of having been wrong.”
That Sartre is proud, there is no doubt about it. So he immediately proposed himself as leader of a new party which would bring together the dissidents of Socialism and the dissidents of Communism. The latest news was that this party had not yet been formed, and Mr. Hagnauer continued, in all likelihood, to feel incapable of thinking.

Michihiko Hachiya: Hiroshima Diary

Doctor Hachiya ran a hospital in Hiroshima. He cared for the victims of the explosion. He is a good observer, who carefully describes to us:
The dead, who looked like boiled octopuses, and smelled strongly of cuttlefish.
The men and women burned, throwing themselves in clusters into ponds or rivers.
The looting and theft, which followed the catastrophe.
And above all the extraordinary joy and enthusiasm which overcame the patients at the announcement that San Francisco had in turn received an atomic bomb.

Lao-Tseu: Tao te King, translated by Jean Herbert

The book of Tao is no clearer for the Chinese than for us, and it is not without reason that Lao Tzu was called the “old master of darkness”. From which it follows that the best translators are the stupidest here: those who respect obscurity and do not seek to understand what it is about – even if it means patiently quoting, like Stanislas Julien, the Chinese commentators; like Jean Herbert, the Western mystics. So here is the theorem (or riddle):

When the main road disappeared, we saw humanity and justice.
When wisdom and insight showed themselves, we saw great hypocrisy.
When the States fell into disorder, we saw faithful and devoted subjects.

The commentator Tchen' Sien writes on this (rather clumsily):

_Before the main road had withered away, men did not abandon each other. Where was humanity? Where was justice? No one noticed them...

And commentator Si-Hoeï:

As soon as prudence and insight were shown, there were great betrayals under the mask of devotion, great hypocrisy under the mask of sincerity.

If we want. These are psychological explanations and one may wonder whether Lao-Tzu had the slightest concern for psychology. No doubt Jean Herbert is better inspired, who quotes Saint-Paul:

The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God…

And Jacob Boehme:

No work outside the will of God can reach the kingdom of God, it is only a useless sculpture in the great labor of men.

Here the doctrinaires of pure love would quite well take their place. But why then hesitate to translate, as Freud did for dreams: “justice is injustice, wisdom is madness, insight is no different from blindness, nor infidelity from fidelity.”
I know that there is something a little discouraging at first glance. But treatises on pure metaphysics are not necessarily meant to encourage us.

Miscellaneous

Actress Nicole Courcel, interviewed by Ciné-Monde (October 15), kindly admits that she does not have “an immense culture” and adds: “Do you find spelling incredibly useful?”
One couldn't say it better, nor more spiritually. Yes, spelling is useful, crazy useful. Because, finally, what relationship would there be, in good reason, between the quality of a thought and grammatical correction?