Paris Journal 1965-1970, by Janet Flanner (Genęt)
Flanner's regular reports for take an interesting measure of the era, and are superb for the quotations they preserve. Her style is itself definitive of the journal for which she reports, The New Yorker. Though she certainly has her own habits of mind and maneuver (seemingly half the entries start by noting that it is the such-and-such anniversary of something-or-other), there is little sense of period prose; the cheery pseudo-objective style veneered in delicate ironies could be from the 1920s but isn't, which continues to be the case at TNY today. She hates traffic; is largely indifferent to popular culture but mad for Jean-Louis Barrault, actor and director of Théâtre de France. She is beguiled by Malraux and bewitched by De Gaulle, in whose direction everything tilts. Even the boilerplate TNY strategy of scoring free-thinking points via easy shots at aristocrats works for the General; more than once she takes pains to point out that the ultra-wealthy have rarely supported Gaullist policies or the man himself, which is at once pillories their blind avarice and their inability to confront reality, while propping up De Gaulle as a progressive figure.
Big Charlie was not without his moments. Though not quoted in Flanner's book, he did manage to suggest in 1967 that Israel "is organizing, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions — and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism.'" Well, you know what they say about broken clocks.
Flanner herself is called to politics as frequently by Art as by world events. In 1965 she quotes from Sartre's translation — Algeria still on his mind — of The Trojan Women at the National Popular Theater:
"Make war, mortal imbeciles! Ravage the fields and the cities, and torture the conquered. You will all die of it."
Even in 1968, as the reporter slowly comes to take the Spring events seriously (against her initial and habitual treatment of willful students and factory strikers as particularly French divertissements), she can report only from the perspective of a Generalist — in her Paris, everyone is waiting around to see what De Gaulle will do. And certainly this is not her Paris alone. But her distance from the other city is marked, and that comes painfully clear in the notes filed in this period. Finally, as well, it comes clear that, as much as she worships the General, she is not on his side: longer than any single discussion of the politics, or the events, or even of De Gaulle on television, is her July 11 report on how much the May days will cost the city of Paris to clean up. In high TNY style, she sees the merits and defaults of the aristocrats and workers, of the students and politicians — sees them clearly and without ideology, of which she has no need, being on the side of money itself.
Posted by jane at July 18, 2007 10:39 AM | TrackBack