America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (37 page)

The man with the missing front teeth said passionately, “All we want is peace. We have peace now, and we want to keep it. We do not want to do anything—and we do not want you to do anything for us—that will lead to war. We are tired of war! We are bitterly tired of war! That's all we think about.”

“Do you think that is the attitude of all Frenchmen?”

“I think so. Of course, I am not sure.”

“Can you tell us the attitude of the Americans?” Louis Gibey asked.

“Not on many things, because we have as many ideas as we are people, but in some general things I think I can. We don't want war any more than you do. But America has no America to protect it. We want to keep our institutions. If they are to change, we want to change them ourselves and in our own time and by our own methods. We think the rest of the free world feels the same, but by an accident in time and economics it has fallen to us, whether we want it or not, to lead, to prod, to organize and to direct the opposition to the forces which would reduce all of us. If we do not do it, who will? Will you? Will the British? Will Italy or Scandinavia?

“Sure, you would defend yourselves. And the enemy would like nothing better than to pick off one at a time the ripe fruits of dissension and national pride.

“Do you think we really like to spend most of our income on weapons when that same money could build dams, plant parks, build symphony orchestras, set up schools such as the world has never known? Do you think we like to defraud ourselves of these things? We could do it, too. Don't think we couldn't. We could retire into our hemisphere and close our eyes to the rest of the world.

“And then, little by little, Europe would stagger and fall. And one day we would be faced with war, and do you know who would do the fighting against us? Your sons, drilled and lied to, figures moving and fighting on the end of a string manipulated from the Kremlin.

“Just remember that leadership is not chosen by a people. It is forced on them. We don't want it, but we have it. And thank Heaven we are not too tired nor too confused nor too cynical to use it. When you are grousing about our help, just think a little of that. Our farmers don't want it, either, but we will not go down without trying. That's my speech.”

The wine peasants of Poligny sipped from their glasses, and their eyes had the French look, cynical and critical and humorous and contentious and very tough and individual. I couldn't tell whether I had got through or not.

Louis Gibey said, “I want to tell you about a paradox. You see, we have always thought of the Catholic Church as the symbol of reaction—the arm of the extreme right. But do you know, there is a whole crop of young priests in France now working for the social changes which are supposed to be the projects of the extreme left. Yes, it is a paradox. The Communists have become the reactionaries, rigid, formalistic, unchanging and unchangeable. It is the clergy now that leads to the left; maybe not the archbishops and cardinals, but the young, tough priests.”

The hard-handed peasants of Poligny sipped their wine and chuck-led. They love a paradox.

Through the open door came the shrill voice of Jenny chanting monotonously, “I love you, I love you a little, I love you passionately.”

And I remembered reading in Albert Guérard's beautiful little history of France the poem:

 

It sounds like a hymn to America, but it was written by Rutilius Namatianus, a Gaul, in the fifth century A.D. And he wrote it about Rome. And Rome was falling.

Then Guérard quotes Virgil's great call to Rome four centuries earlier—“Thy fate it is to rule nations.” If you change the word “rule” to “lead,” it might be said of America today.

It was cool and peaceful in the ancient church and the battered faces of the peasants showed dimly in the semidarkness.

From far up on the mountain behind the town came the belling of a hound on track.

“Ticot,” said Parachute Pants softly.

“I love you to insanity,” shrieked Jenny in the road outside the church.

(fourth piece)

IT WOULD BE ridiculous for me to try to write anything new or original about Paris. In all the world no city has been so loved and so celebrated. Indeed the traveler comes soon to feel that he is received into the arms of this city which is so much more than a city. I imagine that many Americans come to Paris for its restaurants, its gaiety, its beauty. For myself, when I come back to Paris I feel always that I am coming home. I love the good food too and the beauty but I invariably find myself drawn to the Ile de la Cité, that stone ship of the Seine whose cargo has gone to the whole world. I love this island, I love the music in stone which is Notre Dame. I rejoice in the little streets and houses which are material memories of another time. But the relationship goes farther than this. The Ile is holy ground. Here the thinking of the Western world was born—the brave thinking arduously rising out of the noble ruins of Rome and Greece. Here the great ones sorted over the pieces of the past, chose the valid, cast aside the gross, added their own new ingredient and drew a cold world to warm itself at the new fire. And surely the Ile spilled over to the banks and coursed out, but here, right here, physically under my feet, the miracle happened—not quickly but with the incredible labor of birth and growth. I have read of the French Gothic that it draws the eyes to heaven, that it defies or seems to the laws of weight, and the limitations of stone. It seems to me that Notre Dame and its brothers are the symbols of that exuberant thought.

But the great churches are only one symbol—my own thinking, my own conceptions, are no less the products of this tiny island, when the fabric of man's relation to man was picked apart and rewoven with the new thread of responsibility. Here the conception of liberty was born—not only political liberty but the enormous conception that the individual mind of man had not only the right but the duty to rove the world and dig into the heavens. This island raised the heavy sky and kicked out the close horizons. This is indeed holy ground.

My sons are too little for abstractions but I can take them to the Ile and raise for their delight the lovely ghosts. Here where you stand Caesar stood; here Richard of the Lion Heart trotted his heavy charger over the cobbles. Right here Francis the First walked with perhaps Leonardo at his side and here Abelard pushed back his hood and raised his voice. My boys love this pageantry. And later we walk down to the river and sit on the stone and let our feet dangle over the water. We wait patiently for some of the many fishermen to catch a fish and when some tiny thing is hooked we run to examine and to congratulate. This minnow is a triumph beyond which the big game fisherman cannot rise. Kicking our heels against the stone we watch the barges moving by, the laundry drying on the deck and the seeming sweet, slow life of the barge men. Sometimes we can smell the soup cooking in the galley and through a window see the sturdy wife, her sleeves rolled up, stirring the pot. Then there is excitement, another fisherman has landed a fierce fish as big as his little finger.

Sitting there I had a horrid thought, a mean and malicious thought, and I told it to a French friend.

“What would happen,” I asked, “if I should go to an aquarium and buy alive a trout of thirty centimeters—then bring it concealed to the embankment, put a hook in its mouth and throw it living in the river. I would then play it with courage and finally land the beauty.”

“Oh! my friend,” my companion cried. “Put this thought from your mind. Promise you will never do it.”

“But what would happen?”

My friend said seriously, “Fifty fishermen, the flower of Seine fishermen, men of integrity and seriousness, would commit suicide.”

We walk past the bird market. We are always just about to buy a bird—only our inability to decide which bird deters us. We want them all. . . .

How this island, this magic ship, calls to me when I am away from it. How it reassures me that the world is not about to disappear, and that men and ideas are eternal. And this island set in its timeless river proves to me that I am small but reassures me that I am important.

And I will not catch the trout.

(thirteenth piece)

NOW I HAVE more than passed the halfway mark in these little pieces for
Figaro Littéraire
. I have enjoyed the writing of them and also I have enjoyed the generous response to them from the readers. I began the series with timidity because I did not know the fabric of the French mind, I was too ignorant of recent French history. I felt a kind of shyness about writing to Parisians. This shyness has now disappeared because of the generosity of the reception. I knew historically the French genius for fairness and receptiveness but it is quite a different thing to have it proved to me personally. I have even received letters which say I write in the French manner. This cannot be true. I write in my own manner, but the letters further prove that the French, who are renowned throughout the world as the greatest of individualists, have maintained that diagnostic of the individual: tolerance.

How seldom do our most carefully considered plans materialize! I had thought to make all Paris my field. I should have known better. Here, as in New York, my district has become my city. I visit other districts but the place where I buy bread and wine for my family is my village. The gendarme on my corner is no longer police but my gendarme—an individual. The neighborhood people have become my neighbors. I am no longer strange to them nor they to me.

One sees first the broad picture, the design complete but the details undeveloped. Then gradually the outlines of the details become clear and the larger picture fades. I suppose that this is inevitable. I am sure it is good. Paris is becoming a city of units to me, and the units are people. As in a foreign language, words gradually begin to stand out of sentences, so in a foreign city individuals begin to stand out of crowds.

Around the corner from where I live a barrow man has his post. He cleans the street and picks up papers in the park. He lives a comfortable and successful life. At night he sleeps under his barrow and when it rains he drapes a waterproof cover over the handles to make a shelter. His friends visit him under his barrow and sometimes they play cards. The postman delivers mail to the barrow. He has always a bottle of wine uncorked in his shoulder bag and a piece of bread and cheese for his friends. His eye is merry and his nose is not pale. In the great world he would be considered a failure and something of a rascal, for the world of property considers it a sin to be content without things. But from watching him, and I now have a bowing acquaintance with him, I think he is a more successful organism than those worried men with briefcases and feverish eyes who race to work driven by the pressures of things. My man has apparently given up things he can do without for other things to him more important. I admire him.

We learn so many things. This cold unfriendly people, full of self-interest—described by Descartes as a people of unsentimental reason. What utter nonsense! Madame tells my wife not to buy from her but to go a few blocks over where the same thing may be had more cheaply. The kiosk saves for us the papers we want. Just as they have been sorted out to us so we have to them. We are no longer the mass tourists but individuals. It is a lesson we must learn over and over, that people and person are two very different things. We are helped and our way is made easy for us by the kindness of our neighbors. Perhaps this is because we like them very much.

I know that it is considered unseemly for a modern writer to find anything good in his time. I also know, because I have seen it, that there is terrible poverty in Paris, that there are areas of despair and want, that there are groups of anger and also that there are other groups of cynical disdain and selfishness. In spite of this I want to draw to the attention of Parisians some things they may have forgotten perhaps because of the pressures of daily life and perhaps because they are too close and ordinary to be remembered.

Do you know how unique is your respect for the individual no matter what his position? Are you aware of the courtesy and kindness of person to person? The genius for allowing a man to be himself without interference makes a great impression on me. I had always heard of the disagreeableness of the Parisian taxi drivers. What an error. A cigarette exchanged, a few words concerning weather and the world, and this so-called sullenness disappears; one finds a man of incisiveness and intelligence and moreover a member of the best-informed group in the city. The cab drivers know everything and sit like brooding gods on their knowledge.

I wonder whether you Parisians know how kindly you are to the stranger who asks for help. When I've asked directions of a stranger in the street, he has more often than not gone out of his way to direct me and even conducted me to my destination. When I dine in a bistro strange to me, it is my custom to ask the waiter or sommelier to suggest a wine out of the conviction that he knows his cellar better than I. Invariably the result is delicious and by no means the most expensive. When I've shopped for one of the innumerable small items necessary in running a house, the shopkeeper, if he does not have the article, has either sent out for it or conducted me to a shop which had it.

From my window I have seen my small sons returning from play in the park. The gendarme who directs traffic knows them. He stops traffic and makes sure that they arrive safely through the roaring river of motors, then smiles and waves his white stick at them.