Gamins & Spinach

THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS-Elliot Paul-Random House ($2.75).

Global, bearded Elliot Paul is one of the rare writers who has been able to turn an amiable yen for the gutter into pay dirt. If publishers' advance sales figures mean anything, some 25,000 readers were waiting avidly last week for this naughtily natural history of a Paris side street.

Paul is the author of the best-selling The Life and Death of a Spanish Town, of two best-selling murder mysteries, and of three worst-selling novels (Indelible, Impromptu, Imperturbe). He is the ex-coeditor of the esoteric expatriate magazine, transition, and an expert on boogie-woogie and the accordion. He is the man who introduced into the Massachusetts Legislature a bill (defeated) forcing book & play censors to pass an intelligence test and to prove that their sex lives were normal.

The Last Time I Saw Paris is a loving, microscopic peep at the infusorial life of the block-long rue de la Huchette (just off the boul' Mich'), Author Paul's lost hedonistic heaven. Its hotels, bars, bordello and habitues exhale for him the garlicky breath of the real France -"the France one prefers to remember." Mostly they stagger between the tough tenderness of a Daumier cartoon and William Locke's The Beloved Vagabond. They also suggest a reason for France's fall.

Author Paul discovered his beloved street one soft summer night in 1923, when it was still possible "to do things without premeditation." After dropping into "the most perfect small Gothic church in France, St. Severin," he picked up a trollop named Suzanne. She steered him into the rue de la Huchette.

France Found. The rue de la Huchette runs parallel to the left bank of the Seine for some 300 yards. On one corner stood a tiny police station. Usually the cops tried to chase the drunks, their commonest clientele, into another precinct. The Paris police, says Author Paul, were "almost saintly ... in their gentleness and understanding." But one night a smalltime thief tried to break into a store. "When surprised by the even more astonished agents," the marauder wounded one of them. "He was kicked to death that night, on the cold stone floor of our little .local station, and, with intestines steam-ingly exposed, was lugged under a cheap stiff blanket to the morgue. . . . That ended the unfortunate affair."

Across from the police station was Le Panier Fleuri (The Flower Basket), "the neighborhood bordel run by Madame Mariette." The other corner was occupied by a laundry "which employed three hardworking girls and also served as a clandestin. That is to say, men who found it banal to patronize the orthodox establishment could, if they were known to Mme.

Lanier, go upstairs with the laundress of their choice."

At the other end of the rue de la Huchette stood the Hotel du Caveau. Thither Suzanne steered Author Paul. After losing Suzanne, Author Paul sat down at a table awash with Dubonnet. "There," he says, "I found Paris-and France-."

Brittle Arteries. "An angry well-dressed Frenchman about fifty years of age, who looked out of place on the rue de la Huchette, was pummeling with his folded umbrella a young man who bore him a strong family resemblance." The young man fled into the Hotel du Caveau. His name was Pierre Vautier. It turned out that he had defied his father by quitting St. Cyr (the French West Point) and taking a job in an art gallery. "It was a small gallery that specialized in ultramodern paintings of the neo-Cubistic school, the sight or mention of which had, on many occasions, nearly proven disastrous to the father's brittle arteries. Vautier the Elder's aversion to the gallery and its wares had been heightened by the indisputable fact that practically all of the other employes, the owner, most of the artists whose work was on display, and four-fifths of the customers were homosexual."

Author Paul moved into the Hotel du Caveau bag & baggage. In no time at all he was clinking glasses with all the habitues, hangers-on and lodgers at the hotel as well as the tenants of the rue de la Huchette. Among them:

> Madame Berthelot, during World War I, had been one of the "tactful, well-bred," crepe-hung women sent by the solicitous French Government to break the news to the next of kin when soldiers were killed in action. The women must "neither be attractive enough to take men's thoughts away from grief nor ugly enough to scare the stricken children." Later Madame Berthelot worked in the passport bureau. There she owed her promotion from a hard to an easy job to her second cousin by marriage, a petty official called The Navet (Turnip). He got her promoted by "culling evidence of a particularly rare pastime to which one of his chiefs was addicted." The chief frequented "a unique establishment ... the only house of ill-fame in the world whose 'girls' were all more than seventy years old." ^ Therese, the 250-lb. cook, "was a 'numero' in all senses of the word." ("A 'numero' . . . was one degree lower than a 'type,' but less severe than 'individu.' ") Armed with a butcher's knife and fortified with three liters of red wine (her daily quota: five liters), Therese was formida ble. She endeared herself to the local wags by surreptitiously serving the unpopular Navet "chat farci" -stuffed cat.

> Madame Absalom, who kept the yarn shop, avidly scanned the local press of Clermont-Ferrand every day "in gleeful anticipation of the demise of her 'ex,' as she called him. . . ." He suffered from rheumatism and a facial tic which she could imitate to perfection.

> Hyacinthe Goujon, age six, who had ambitions to be a movie star, carried a tiny powder box, a small stick of rouge and chose her own perfume, "had quite astonishing ideas about her clothes and those of other 'women.' " She told Author Paul "without a flicker of her violet-blue eyes or a vulgar inflection of her well-trained voice, that she remained with Madame Absalom on Tuesday and Friday afternoons because her mother entertained her 'lover' on those days." ^ M. Corre, the conservative who ran the Epicerie Danton, scrimped so that his son could learn German and become a big salesman some day. Result: because he knew German, young Corre was sent to the Maginot Line, killed. ^ Odette kept the butter & eggs store and wore green-black clothes and looked pious and demure. "Actually she was an infidel and a Socialist." The milk she sold was bluish and watery; her eggs "bore unmistakable evidence of having been near hens."

>M. Panache was a floor walker. Like his crony, The Navet, he was generally detested (all the conservatives in The Last Time I Saw Paris are detestable). "To keep M. Panache in a perpetual hell of suspicion and rage," the chestnut vendor kept whispering to him that the proprietor of the Hotel du Caveau "rented Panache's room now and then for twenty-minute periods to streetwalkers who did not draw the color line." The street was delighted when he contracted the barber's itch. >M. de Malancourt, a wealthy gentleman, had an "astonished camera artist take an art photo of his plump and symmetrical backsides, without drapery." Then he sent a handsomely mounted and autographed print to an art expert whom he suspected of selling him a fake Watteau. Sued for libel by the expert, M. de Malancourt conducted his own defense in the great French tradition. "A picture of one's backsides, he argued, was more intimate and personal than a photograph of one's face. To send it to a friend or acquaintance, therefore, was not an insult, but a mark of affection and esteem. Furthermore, it was a token more permanent and honest than the conventional photograph, since one's bottom changes less rapidly and radically than one's face, the latter being exposed to wind and weather as well as the ravages of time." The human face, Monsieur de Malancourt remarked, is like that of a fish and has been immemoriably, much over-rated as an art-object.

Author Paul also has lively and knowing accounts of the local Reds (Pierre Vautier became a devout Communist), and of Le Panier Fleuri, its personnel and practices. Interspersed are bright observations on French art, cooking, music, writers, women and politics.

For 18 years off & on Author Paul lived on the rue de la Huchette and watched with interest and partisan passion the political schism that split the side street, like the rest of France, into two great hostile camps. But Author Paul's political concern lacks the gusto of his human ribaldry. There is a suggestion that the citizenry of the rue de la Huchette are somehow symbolic of democracy everywhere and that, if they had run things, the Nazis would never have got to Paris. But in view of all that goes before, their pathos in the war and the Nazi invasion is less pathetic than grotesque, less like the end of Man's Fate than the end of A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go. When the cat and her kittens come tumbling in and pounce on the rat, the mouse and the little frog-gie, it is still just gamins and spinach. For Author Paul is guilty of one of the oldest of demagogic fallacies: he confuses democracy with its lowest common denominators.

Sixteen Fancy Dives

RAZZLE DAZZLE-William Saroyan- Harcourf, Brace ($3.50).

In his preface to one of these 16 short plays William Saroyan compares himself to George Bernard Shaw. The comparison is not altogether presumptuous. He shares with Shaw a fearless, sassy gaiety, and like Shaw he holds naturalism, heavyminded-ness and the theater in general in contempt. Both, in Saroyan's words, believe that the theater "all theater-should be fun. . . ." Whatever else they are, these plays and prefaces are fun.

The plays are a bright, shifty blend of parable, poem, ballet, vaudeville, dream and relaxed ad-libbing. At their worst they contain, as Saroyan confesses, "careless and cheap feelings . . . cleverness and petty bitterness, spoofing and kidding, vulgarity here and there perhaps. . . ." At their best they meet Saroyan's requirements for art: "The surprise of art is not shock, but wonder. . . . The excitement it creates is not that of fear or loathing or irritation, but the excitement of revelation, understanding, love, and delight." Now & then Saroyan's spontaneity has the revelatory abruptness of a magnesium flare.

In Elmer and Lily, a revue for Negroes, a little boy walks "like a good prize fighter returning to his corner . . . after a round in which he has done very well" and says: "Harry Walker, that's my name." ^ Talking to You, a straight dream, constructs a context of strange beauty in which the following lyric occurs:

The tiger I see is a man who is blind

And cannot see me.

I can see the man but not the tiger.

Tiger, poor tiger,

Angry and blind.

From the tree in the graveyard

The Crow calls your name:

Tiger, poor tiger.

Saroyan's prefaces are not by any means he glittering mirror-mazes in which Shaw shows off his plays, but he delivers limself of some nobly arrogant lines.

On the theater: "I am opposed to practically everything in, and connected with, the present American theater, including its methods, purposes, and people. [ am even opposed to the third-rate public t has created. I am waiting for the people of the present theater to die or retire. I shall not be grieved in either event."

On his parable-play, The Agony of Little Nations: "The only nation, little or big, s the nation of the human body, with the luman spirit in it, and the only agony of hat nation is the agony known to that spirit. . . . Politics is never going to improve the condition of the human body or relieve the agony of the human spirit. War is not going to do these things. ... I am convinced in my heait that neither Mr. Churchill nor Mr. Roosevelt, nor any of their allies or enemies, is anything xcepting a human failure."

Saroyan writes like a fancy diver. Like a diver, he can never revise his act in midair. His best impulses have an extraordinary daring, purity and liveliness. But sometimes they fail to come off, or are brought off only by a fake twist. Like some comedians and jazz musicians, Saroyan is creating a warm and genuine popular art. The question is whether fancy diving can ever become sustained and serious flight.

On the Skids

The so-called "little magazines," whose existence is precarious enough in peacetime, are among the first literary victims of war. With them is silenced a measure of priceless individualism: the quiet, scrupulous use of the creative or critical mind.

England's New Statesman & Nation, Life & Letters, Today and Horizon, which was threatened last summer (TIME, July 14), are almost alone in the world. In the U.S. the Southern Review's death was announced soon after Pearl Harbor (TIME, Feb. 2). By last week two others, The Kenyan Review and Partisan Review, were on the skids and were asking, not too hopefully, for help.

The Kenyan Review, at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, is a three-year-old literary magazine edited by able, fractious Critic-Poet John Crowe Ransom. Better at poetry than at fiction, better at criticism than either, it was until lately supported in part by the college, in part "by annual personal pledges from about ten close friends of the college." Needed: $2,500 per year.

Partisan Review (TIME, May 27, 1940) devotes more space to various hues & cries of semi-Trotskyism than interests most lovers of letters. But in the rest of its pages it maintains the most exacting cultural standards since Hound & Horn died in 1934. Among its contributors: Andre Gide, Edmund Wilson, T. S. Eliot. Needed: $1,500.

Such magazines are often just as trivial, academic or bumptious as those which pay their own way. But they also give superior, non-commercial work almost the only chance it has to be printed.

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