Journal note on his role at the NRF

1930

[On the eve of a trip to London, Paulhan reflects on his role at The NRF and the hostility or goodwill it arouses.]

I will no longer feel watched or important; This came to me especially following the reflections I had made on a young writer, more or less a friend of mine, Guéhenno, who has just taken over the editorship of the magazine Europe; On this I had wondered if he would succeed, I had compared his qualities and his faults: he has very great moral qualities and, as they say, noble ideas, I mean disinterested (which apply above all to the development and education of the people from whom he himself comes, and whom he would like to see both very well educated - and educated a little in a way other than according to the culture of “bourgeois class”, he thinks, that we receive today in high schools) […]. With this, however, anxious to make literature useful […] I thought that on this point he could have more than one disappointment and would undoubtedly be led to choose for himself a more direct mode of action (for example to become a political orator). Arriving there […], I suddenly assumed that people must have thought of me in exactly the same way, made the same thoughts about my entry into the N.R.F. —not necessarily hostile, it was worse: benevolent with that kind of benevolence which considers people “arrested”, as finite, which weighs and measures them.

Life is full of fearsome things, Seghers, 1989.