Burgundy in Holyoke

The soda jerker at South Hadley's sole fountain said bon jour to customers who last week asked for the soda au chocolat. Under the nearby shade trees of Mount Holyoke College's New England campus, entretiens (discussions) raged in French.

There 80-odd scholarly Europeans and Americans had a marvelous time. For Mount Holyoke, long a home of ultra-serious-minded education, was trying earnestly to take the place of Burgundy's 12th-Century Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, until 1939 a sort of Chautauqua for Europe's top-drawer intellectuals.

Original Pontigny. In his Burgundian abbey, Historian-Critic Paul Desjardins, a Sevres normal-school professor, during 23 summers assembled groups of scholars, writers, artists, for decades (ten-day periods). They drank the local wine, walked by the local river, played intellectual games, reveled in organized chats on fixed topics led by experts. Old Pontigny stars: Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Roger Fry, Gaetano Salvemini.

Of those days Andre Maurois wrote: ". . . There was an immediate clash between the morbid susceptibilities of Monsieur Desjardins . . . the diabolical maliciousness of Gide. . . . The Germans . . . enveloped the lucid ideas of the Frenchmen in ... abstractions . . . Lytton Strachey ... in amazement at our lack of humor . . . went to sleep. ... Its virtues far outweighed its drawbacks. . . . There was talk of giving Paul Desjardins the Nobel Prize for Peace."

Rebirth at South Hadley. With Desjardins dead and his abbey reported restored to the Cistercian monks (who had sold it in the early 1900s), Mount Holyoke's crisp, French-fluent Professor Helen Elizabeth Patch last year suggested that her old Sorbonne master, Gustave Cohen, and fellow refugees of New York's Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes might enjoy some summer days at her college.

So Porter Hall, a girls' dormitory, took the place of Pontigny. And last week for the second year, intellectuals who had bandied ideas in Burgundy found themselves just as happy in Massachusetts, although they missed such old Ponti-nians as rapier-sharp Gide. General topic of the second summer of Mount Holyoke entretiens: "permanence of values and renovation of means," with weekly subdivisions for poetry, politics, sociology, science, theater, art, the novel.

Some participants on the schedule: Belgian appeals court President Henri Rolin (whom Hitler blitzed out); Italian Art Critic Lionello Venturi (whom Mussolini hounded out); Spanish Scholar Alfredo Mendizabal (whom Franco locked out); France's Surrealist Andre Masson, Mathematician Jacques Hadamard, Playwright Henri Bernstein, Novelist Julian Green; America's Philosopher James Bissett Pratt (Williams), Poet-Journalist James Rorty, Scholar Henri Maurice Peyre (Yale), Poet Critic John Peale Bishop.

Each morning last week a poet talked for an hour, selected experts discussed, then whom the spirit moved put in his oar. Meals were simple, cheap. Evening diversions: music and charades of international complexity. Sports were badminton and swimming. Girl undergraduates and WAVES in training goggled and giggled at bewhiskered foreigners' aquatic style.

Presiding in Desjardins' place (with equal wit, neater whiskers) was eloquent Gustave Cohen. Belgian-born Cohen first taught French at Leipzig in 1906, rose to the Sorbonne, became a sort of bishop of French letters. He unearthed, dusted off medieval plays, founded the Theophilians who staged them in front of Chartres and Reims Cathedrals. Cohen carries in him nine World War I grenade splinters, walks with two canes. Marshal Petain personally cited him for the Legion of Honor for gallantry, later kicked him out of his Sorbonne chair for being a Jew. In the U.S., Cohen has staged his medieval dramas at Yale, Manhattan's Hunter College and Ecole Libre (of which he is the father). Last week he published his 25th and 26th books (La Grande Clarte du Moyen Age, Lettres aux Americains).

Helping Cohen is French Philosopher-Poet Jean Andre Wahl, a distant relative of famed Henri Bergson. Wahl, a tiny man with a face like a benevolent hawk, has long made a specialty of U.S. philosophy, tried to tell Europeans that the U.S. has culture as well as Fords and Frigidaires. Just out of a Nazi concentration camp, Wahl went to Holyoke's 1942 entretiens, aired a streamlined mysticism,-* was asked to stay at Mount Holyoke to teach. He has just prepared a U.S. poetry number of Fontaine, now France's leading literary review (published in Algiers).

But some of his friends baffle the campus. Example: a violinist who last week appeared nipping a yoyo.

* Between Gestapo question sessions he read mystic Moby Dick.

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