The French Reviews
The appearance of no less than four new French literary reviews since January of this year, at a moment when our local Cassandras are still bewailing the decease of Horizon, would seem to indicate that conditions are more favourable to the would-be author in Paris than in London. This should make us blush, but I fancy the contrast is due rather to a difference in the habits of the reading public in our respective countries than to deficiencies on one 'side.
Whatever the reason, the fact remains : since January we have seen the first numbers of Jacques Laurent's La Parisienne, Maurice Nadeau's Les Lettres Nouvelles and of Exils—rather pretentiously got up, this last, and devoted to poetry only. And finally there is the resurrection of the N.R.F. with two Ns instead of one, but otherwise Unchanged—a resurrection combining the interest of the phoenix With much of its unreality. Of these ventures the N.N.R.F. and Les Lettres Nouvelles are the most significant, since they are, to some extent, complementary. In the latter M. Nadeau has tried to assemble the avant-garde of contemporary French literature— rather a tame avant-garde stretching from Jacques Prevert to Samuel Beckett—while the N.N.R.F. is content with more solid reputations, the pillars of the house of Gallimard. A glance down the title-page of its first number gives the impression that nothing has changed. All the old names are there : Saint-John Persc—in a wonderful burst Of marine imagery—Malraux, Fargue, Montherlant, Schlumberger, Supervielle—this is a review in the military sense—almost a parade. Only youth is absent, unless the fumbling in some of the book notes IS due to the inexperience of the reviewers. Those in Les Lettres Nouvelles are much better done.
Not surprisingly the new N.R.F. has come in for a good deal of criticism from existing reviews. It) Esprit Albert Beguin has attacked the editors—Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland—for not mentioning Drieu La Rochelle, who edited the N.R.F. from 1940 to 1943 with the approval of the Germans. M. Beguin comments : Anything, but not this shamefaced silence. Drieu is not a man to be ashamed of. To keep quiet about him is to appear either to approve of him without daring to say so or to insult his memory. And this is only a particular instance of a more general charge—that of trying to put the clock back to 1939. Bernard Franck puts it poetically in the April number of Les Temps Modernes : " Yes, iris as if those, who were once great Writers, dressed as grave-diggers, were carrying in their aged, trembling hands the coffin holding a generatiOn's treasures," and, though this hardly applies to someone like Malraux, there is a slightly macabre air about these gifts from the past collected on the lap of one pub- lishing-house—a point about which Francois Mauriac has been still more outspoken (v. La Table Ronde, February number).
Yet the N.N.R.F. has its importance. A more central type of literary review has been needed in France for some time. Immediately after the Liberation French writers tended to adopt Sartre's theory of !literature engagee—a literature that would be a complete image of the human situation. In practice, this meant a rather heavy emphasis on the political and the sociological, and the results can be seen in a review such as Esprit, directed by M. Beguin along the left-wing Catholic lines laid down by Emmanuel Mounier, or Les Temps Modernes edited by M. Sartre himself. Both these reviews have recently shown an increasing preoccupation with political and social issues, and literature has come off second-best. A reaction was bound to set in and look for its own vehicle of expression. Unfortu- nately, admirable as existing publications like La Table Ronde or Les Ca/tiers du Sad are, they were not in a position to fill the gap—La Table Ronde on account of its rather conservative approach and Les Cahiers du Sud because of its definitely regional character. Critique— perhaps the most intelligent of them all—is, as its name suggests, purely critical and could provide no outlet for creative writing.
There was, therefore, a place for new reviews, and it is to be regretted that they have hardly come up to expectations. Les Lettres Nouvelles has probably been handicapped by the fragmentary nature of the younger generation of writers, by the lack of perceptible " move- ments," and any reader will agree that M. Nadeau has done the best he could with insufficient material. The editors of the new N.R.F., on the other hand, for all the excellence of some of their contributors, have refused to face the very real problem raised by the claims on literature of our warring ideologies. With litterature engagee dis- appearing into the coils of various political orthodoxies, with a reaction beginning in favour of greater literary autonomy, there is a need for a review which will place the relationship of literature to society where it belongs—on the moral plane—and this cannot be done by a return to art for art's sake. Certain French writers have already got beyond the sterile antithesis of litterature pure and 'literature engagee. Is it too much to ask that editors should follow
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