I saw a good deal of Graham Greene in the late forties and fifties. Once he mentioned that he was writing a film script. He told me the plot and it sounded pretty boring. I wondered who would want to see it.
There is no use pretending it has been a brilliant season. It hasn’t, and no amount of sentimental recall can disguise the fact. During the holidays there was some glitter in the pale winter sun, but on closer examination it proved to be only the tinsel on a forest of Christmas trees. Not that there haven’t been moments; quite the contrary.
The Paris theatre has undergone almost a complete change since the beginning of the Second World War. The occupation years, though lean and terrible ones, witnessed the dawn. Henry de Montherlant’s La Reine Morte was created at the Comedie-Francaise in 1942 and in 1943 Gerard Philippe made his debut in Jean Giraudoux’s Sodome et Gomorrhe at the Hebertot. Jean Anouilh’s Antigone was produced the following year, as was Jean-Paul Sartre’s first play, Les Mouches, while the 1940-45 period saw the staging of Andre Roussin’s initial comedies.
On the corner made by the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail and the rue Delambre, across the street from the large and garish Café de la Rotonde, during those earlier days, was the then smaller place called the Cafe du Dôme. The Rotonde had new soft benches and polished tables. On the walls it had paintings of nudes, and still-lives of fruit and flowers, and landscapes of Brittany and the south of France. It had a fancy, spacious washroom with a woman in charge.
Historically, poets have generally adopted one of two main “poses,” or manners of considering their own metier. One has been the prophet, or vates, the divine madman who scrawls out his gifts from the gods in a state of inspiration and frenzy. The vates corresponds to the popular conception of the poet as long-haired eccentric. Contemporary critical opinion, on the other hand, often seems to disbelieve in the vates, and to expect all poets to conform to the other traditional category, that of the craftsman, the careful “maker.”
By one of those delightful and seemingly inevitable proximities to which life is always party where fiction wouldn’t dare, an artist with a passion for the theatre of pantomime, ballet and circus finds herself installed in a Montparnasse atelier directly above the apartment of a young man who is a famous mime and an obliging model. T
Men have often dreamed of putting an end to the problem of religion. It was the dream of Lucretius: “How many crimes have been inspired by religion!” (1). The Encyclopedists thought they had done it, and in fact their influence made itself felt in every country and across every continent.
And yet there is scarcely a human being now in the world who does not experience every day in his own inner life the reverberations of a great single religious drama that has the whole planet at its theatre.
An account of the ballet in Paris since the war can only bear the simple label of chaos. But in a good sense of variety and ceaseless activity. The inexhaustible Académie Nationale de Musique et de Danse has stood firm amidst a welter of dance companies, smaller troupes and so forth, which have organized, some to dazzle briefly and disappear, perhaps to disband, perhaps to reappear under a different name.
Certain sentries of respectability still cannot accept Cubism. The Musée de l’Art Moderne has scoured the continents for the 231 items in its vast Cubist retrospective (1907-1914); it has assembled documents, photographs and architectural motifs to prove the movement’s overflow into adjacent fields; Jean Cassou penned a eulogy holding it up as the most fundamental renewal since the Renaissance; and still the more reluctant wing of French criticism can only stiffen up and mutter that a split was generated by the movement.
It is often said that the French are not a musical people. But Paris is still one of the great musical cities of Europe. It can’t compete with the opera of Vienna and Milan and its orchestras are not Europe’s best, but its interest and activity are tremendous. Nowhere else is musical controversy so sharp and almost nowhere else do concert audiences periodically get violent when they don’t like what the orchestra is doing.
A Parisian looking for a common grave in which to be buried is restricted in his choice to somewhere in the suburbs, to one of the cemeteries reserved for Parisians out in Bagneux, Pantin, or Thiais. There is no common grave any more in Paris itself.