Paul Morand - Venices

I have always been attracted to lost causes: Fouquet, Caillaux, Berthelot, Laval. When they were sent to prison, dragged before the High Court, ignominiously removed from their duties or sent to the gallows, my affection for them grew all the more. What was it that linked such varied destinies? Would a psychoanalyst be able to explain this? It goes back a long way; when asked “Why are you a Dreyfusard?”, I had answered, aged eight, that it was because there were no others in my class, a reply that was to remain famous among members of my family, who actually saw it not so much as an indication of force of character, but rather of naïvety.

Success followed by failure would remain the theme of the books I wrote between 1950 and the sixties; after Fouquet, Le Flagellant de Séville, Les Clés du souterrain, Le Dernier Jour de l’Inquisition, Hécate … As a child, I slept with my thumbs pressed inside the palms of my hands; psychoanalysts saw this as a sign of introversion. Since 1917, one of my future wife’s brothers had lived in Zurich, where he was treated by Schmit Guisan, a pupil of Freud’s and Jung’s; this was how I knew of the existence of psychoanalysis five or six months before this attempt at liberation was known about in France; the contrast between the hidden sexual life and social life has always filled me with wonder. Gide says somewhere that he hovered around psychoanalysis; in my case, it was psychoanalysis that hovered around me, resoling my former Christian shoes along the path of penitence.

Those forms of peace that are enforced or negotiated, that are glorious or shameful, are to do with politics; for the writer as for the ploughman, there is only one form of peace, not several. I have only ever loved peace; though this fidelity has brought me some strangely disloyal strokes of luck; it has taken me from a very advanced left-wing position in 1917 to deposit me in 1940 in a Vichy upheld by the ideas of Charles Maurras, where I was no less ill at ease. It is not man himself who changes, it is the world that revolves around him; I have known England in Victorian times, when to use the word “trousers” was frowned upon, only to discover today nowadays an Albion that bathes naked in the fountains of Trafalgar Square; I have seen Russian officers in 1917 with their epaulettes ripped off, only to find a USSR that is concocting thousands of honorary distinctions and reinstating a mandarin form of hierarchy.

In between the two is that hemiplegic body that we nowadays call Europe…

The reason why these period portraits do not deserve to age too quickly is because, fifty years earlier, they prefigure our present times. In them I can identify that bitterness of someone like Scott Fitzgerald, writing in 1925: “Our parents have done enough of this damage; the old generation practically laid waste to the world before passing it on to us.” After 1917, I disassociated myself from my elders, without ever ceasing to accept their bequest; the heartbreak of the emancipated.

In 1917, Marcel Sembat, one of the leaders of the SFIO [the French Socialist party between 1905 and 1971] and a highly cultivated man, befriended me (the ground floor of the Berthelots’ home, on the boulevard Montparnasse, adjoined Léon Blum’s flat: domestic and foreign policy mingled there, in an atmosphere I associate with the last days of Symbolism, the former Revue blanche, Lugné-Poe and Claudel, and which did not survive after 1918). Sembat introduced me to the paintings that were being done by the new generation; I dared to contravene my father’s maxim: “As far as Cézanne, but no further”; Sembat, a gentle and tolerant man, humanised socialism; it was due to him that I came to understand that we had to overcome our dread of the working man, one of the legacies of 1848 and 1871.

That year, I met another Socialist leader, Bracke-Desrousseaux; it was at V.M.’s5 home (during supper, Claudel handed out hard-boiled eggs, on which he had written poems, to each of us). “I believe in socialism, but I can only think of it as national”, I remarked innocently to Bracke-Desrousseaux. (I little imagined that, twenty years later, these two words would cause Europe to explode.) He replied dryly: “Impossible; socialism is international in its essence.”

1919

AFTER TWO YEARS in Rome and Madrid, I returned to Paris bringing with me some poems that were those of an impatient young man; some were written in Venice, among them this:

Oh! Nous ne pouvons attendre davantage…

(Oh! We can’t wait any longer…)

or:

… Nous nous langons sur la mer sans routes…

(… We embark upon uncharted seas…)

or:

… Nos cadets, on lit dans leurs yeux

Qu’ils ne souffriront pas d’attendre…

… A quand un large et continuel don de tout à tous?

A quand une grande course, pieds nus, autour du globe?

(You can see in the eyes of our younger brothers / that they will not put up with waiting… /… When shall we all make generous, continuous sacrifices to one another? / When shall we race barefooted around the globe?)

A more distant note was struck there; it came from:

… Le Passé… avec ses

héros, histoire, expérience, en toi engrangés!

L’héritage total qui a convergé vers toi…

(… The Past… with its heroes, history and experiences that are stored within you! / Our entire inheritance which has converged on you…)

The note struck is that of Leaves of Grass. For many years the athletic, lush and elemental verse of Walt Whitman had made him my superman. Hugo? By the time I left the lycée I had got no further than Eviradnus (I would not discover his Bouche d’ombre until half a century later). It was in Whitman that I first inhaled the scents of the open road and of woman.

I had thought the itinerant American was unknown in France; I was wrong; translated in 1907, the lessons he preached had not been lost; I encountered them in unanimism and in the work of Duhamel and Romains; Whitman had inspired Cendrars’s Pâques à New York; following in his footsteps, Cocteau had just sailed down the Potomac; Whitman was assumed to be the inspiration for Supervielle’s Débarcadères and Gravitations , just as he had fascinated Barnabooth, the tramp dressed by Henry Poole: in the United States, Hemingway and Dos Passos had taken high altitude rest cures with Whitman.

I am for those who march abreast

with the whole world…

It was the last echo of an international romanticism, of the year 1848 stretched out on a planetary scale.

1920

OPENING OF HARRY’S BAR (before Orson Welles and Hemingway).

1922 OUVERT LA NUIT6

AFTER THE WAR of 1870, those attending Flaubert’s cénacle —his literary gatherings — were searching for an overall title for what was to become Les Soirées de Médan , made famous by Boule-de-Suif, and apparently almost called the anthology La Guerre comique ; this casual reaction was not blasphemy, but rather a sigh in the wake of great danger; the same could be observed in 1918; this explains, and may perhaps excuse, my Nuits .

In the colourful language they used at the time, the critics were very easy-going about the superficiality of a book that cocked a snook at the vast wide world, the world of fifty years ago that still seemed immense. It was a cry of happiness at having survived, one that struck a false note in an age that was already impoverished; a happiness for which friends of mine, such as Proust or Larbaud, who were very ill, envied me; all I longed for was a little of their genius, whereas they used to say: “I should have liked to live like Morand.” (Without knowing each other, each of them said exactly that.) May they not envy me for the time I spent “living well”. How much time was lost in making up time! Larbaud, responding to my De la vitesse [“On speed”], dedicated his essay La Lenteur [“Slowness”] to me; he was the true voluptuary.