Out of the Night

News of France's writers was trickling out at last. During the Nazi night of occupation most of them had done some work of one kind or another:

P: Colette (Gabrielle Goudeket), aged hothouse romancer, stayed in Paris, worked in bed as usual, churned out seven books (novels, short stories, impressions). One of them, Le Kepi, is a current best-selling novel.

P: Paul Eluard, tall, elegant Surrealist poet turned Communist, emerged as the principal literary figure of French resistance. Hunted by the Gestapo for his anti-Nazi pamphlets and clandestine magazine La Pensee Libre, he finally hid in an insane asylum where psychoanalysts and nurses secretly tended Maquis wounded.

P: Jean Malaquais (War Diary) disappeared after working in a jam cannery, is thought to be somewhere in the U.S.

P: Andre Malraux (Man's Hope; Man's Fate), radical novelist, wrote one book (published in Switzerland as Les Noyers de l'Altembourg), lived with the Maquis and F.F.I., became a colonel. Wounded, captured, liberated in time's nick during the invasion, thin, nervy Malraux is now fighting at the front. P: Jean Cocteau, famed Surrealist specialist in films and plays, had trouble when collaborationists released rats and tear gas in the theater where one of his plays was put on; they also punched his nose when he refused to salute a pro-German parade.

P: Paul Morand, high-toned novelist (Ouvert la Nuit; Ferme la Nuit), became Vichy Ambassador at Budapest, then at Bern--where he prudently remains.

P: Jean-Paul Sartre, released after nine months as a prisoner of war, became France's most popular underground worker. Tiny, bespectacled Sartre is working on a three-volume novel.

P: Henry de Montherlant, arrogant, aristocratic novelist, enraged patriotic Frenchmen with his book Solstice de Juin, turned up for the opening of his new play, Reine Morte, with a bust of himself under his arm and a pocketful of medals struck with his profile. All Montherlant plays have been banned.

P: Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Louis Des-touches) prewar Fascist and one of France's most brilliant novelists, (Journey to the End of the Night), wrote virulent, anti-Semitic articles for the Nazis. He was turned down when he applied for German citizenship, but Parisians guess he is now in Germany.

P: Louis Aragon, Communist poet, beat all records for production--seven volumes of poems, one novel, one biography, three anti-Nazi books, numerous leaflets, manifestoes, etc. Of his closest literary aides and friends: Georges Pollitzer, Jacques Decour, Daniel Solte, Jacques Solomon, Aragon reports: "All shot."

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