And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (52 page)

One day the officer announces that he must travel to Paris. Upon his return, he asks them to forget everything he has said during the previous months. In Paris, he met German soldiers who felt different about France. They told him, “We’re not mad or stupid: we have the opportunity to destroy France and we will. Not only its power, also its soul. Above all, its soul. Its soul is the biggest threat. This is our job at this moment: Don’t fool yourself, my dear. We will corrupt it with our smiles and tenderness. We will turn it into a groveling bitch.”
¹²
The officer then discloses that, disgusted by what he heard, he has asked to be transferred to the Russian Front and will be leaving the following morning. Once again, he wishes his hosts good night. Then, looking intently at the young woman, he adds, “Adieu.” Long seconds later, breaking her silence for the first and last time, she whispers, “Adieu.”
^*

Le Silence de la mer
raised some difficult issues, notably whether silence was the proper response to the occupation and whether a
German officer should be portrayed sympathetically in print. But, while not knowing the real name of its author, the Free French Forces in London approved of the book, and
Les Lettres Françaises
hailed it as “the most moving, the most deeply human book that we have had the opportunity to read since the beginnings of the German occupation.”
¹³

Encouraged by the response, Bruller decided to publish more books through Éditions de Minuit. Yvonne Paraf, who kept Vercors’s identity secret until the end of the war, crossed the demarcation line into the unoccupied zone to collect the manuscript of
À travers le désastre
by the exiled philosopher Jacques Maritain, who had already published it in the United States as
France, My Country, Through the Disaster
. This appeared under the Éditions de Minuit imprint in October 1942. Then, early in 1943, Bruller made contact with Paulhan and suddenly gained access to Paulhan’s entire resistance circle. This was reflected in the third book,
Chroniques interdites
(Banned Chronicles), published in April 1943, which included a tribute by Paulhan to Jacques Decour. Over the next sixteen months, another twenty-one small books were published under a variety of pseudonyms. Triolet published her novella
Les Amants d’Avignon
as Laurent Daniel; Mauriac offered an essay,
Le Cahier noir
, as Forez; Debû-Bridel paid tribute to English literature in
Angleterre (d’Alcuin à Huxley)
,
^*
under the name of Argonne; Guéhenno published
Dans la prison
, adapted from his private journal, as Cévennes; and Morgan published a novella,
La Marque de l’homme
, as Mortagne. John Steinbeck’s short novel about occupation and resistance in an unnamed country,
The Moon Is Down
, was also issued by Éditions de Minuit shortly before the liberation, as
Nuits noires
. It was described as the first complete French translation to distinguish it from
Nuits sans lune
, an edition published in Switzerland in 1943 in which key sections had been eliminated.

Poetry, however, proved best suited to the conditions of the occupation. A poem required little paper, it was easily remembered and recited, it could be copied by hand and left on a café table, it could be broadcast by the BBC and, above all, it carried a sharp emotional punch. Further, resistance poetry enjoyed a monopoly since no collaborationist
writer ever tried to express his Fascism in verse. Aragon was particularly skilled at publishing poems in which resistance messages were disguised as literary, historical or lyrical references. “Contraband in literature is the art of awakening forbidden sentiments with authorized words,” he explained after the war.
¹⁴

Another poet, Pierre Seghers, kept quality poetry alive in the unoccupied zone through his review,
Poésie ’40
, which changed its date with each year. Edited at his home in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, outside Avignon, it was subject to Vichy censorship yet enjoyed considerable freedom. Seghers made a point of including poems by French prisoners of war mailed from German camps and of sending copies of
Poésie
to these camps. He later recalled being moved by a letter he received in early 1942 in which a POW recounted how, inspired by
Poésie
, he and his friends put out a monthly poetry review in their prison camp. “Your review does me good,” the letter writer said. “That’s all. All French people should know the place that those of us who have nothing give to poetry, and the faith we all have in the future of French poetry.” He ended:
“Monsieur Seghers, courage, courage, courage, courage.”
The following year, Seghers devoted an entire issue of
Poésie ’43
to
Poètes Prisonniers
.

Other important outlets for poetry were
Le Figaro
’s literary supplement and René Tavernier’s
Confluences
, both in unoccupied Lyon;
Les Cahiers du Sud
in Marseille; and Max-Pol Fouchet’s
Fontaine
in Algiers. In Paris,
Les Cahiers d’Art
managed to combine intellectual resistance—its office on the rue du Dragon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés was often used to edit
Les Lettres Françaises—
with publishing poetry, both privately and with German approval.

Scores of poets emerged during the occupation, but Aragon and Éluard, both in their mid-forties, were the most prolific and the most influential. And thanks to the occupation, they even patched up a bitter quarrel dating back to 1933, when Éluard (along with André Breton) was expelled from the Communist Party and Aragon was drummed out of the Surrealist movement. Until then, Éluard and Aragon were the leading Surrealist poets. In contrast, their verse during the occupation was clear, direct and emotive. The principal difference was between their signed poems and those published anonymously or under a pseudonym; those that passed German censorship evoked the deep melancholy and malaise of the times, while their resistance poems were often violent in denouncing the Nazis
and their French vassals. Both men were also lucky never to be jailed,
^*
not least because their individual styles could be recognized in some of their clandestine poems.

Aragon was the first to bring poetry to Éditions de Minuit with a raging verse epic called
Le Musée Grevin
. But by then, as part of his “clandestine literature,” he had already published one collection with Gallimard in Paris,
Le Crève-coeur
, in 1941 and another in Switzerland,
Les Yeux d’Elsa
(Elsa’s Eyes), in 1942. In “Les Lilas et les roses” (The Lilacs and the Roses), written immediately after France’s defeat in June 1940 and published in
Le Crève-coeur
, Aragon contrasts spring with the pain of defeat. It opens:

Oh month of blossomings month of metamorphoses
May that was without clouds and June stabbed
I will never forget the lilacs and the roses
Nor those whom spring has folded in her arms.

The poem then evokes soldiers, tanks, panic and death, and continues:

All is quiet The enemy rests in the shadows
We learn this evening of the surrender of Paris
I will never forget the lilacs and the roses
Nor the two loves that we have lost.

In “La Nuit d’exil” (The Night of Exile), Aragon imagines faraway Paris:

We will never again see that distant paradise
Les Halles l’Opéra la Concorde and the Louvre
Those nights you remember when the night would conceal us
The night that comes from the heart and has no morning.

As the occupation advanced, this tone of resignation was replaced by more combative verse. In 1943, Aragon published “Ballade de celui qui chanta dans les supplices” (Ballad of He Who Sang on the
Torture Rack) in
Les Lettres Françaises
and dedicated it to Gabriel Péri, a young Communist shot in December 1941 after refusing to reveal resistance secrets.

And if it had to be done again
I would take the same road
The voice rising from the chains
Speaks to the men of tomorrow.

While Aragon the poet was writing prolifically, Aragon the Communist was busily organizing doctors and lawyers, as well as writers, into resistance groups in the south. From February 1943 to March 1944, he also put out his own clandestine monthly,
Les Étoiles
, which began with a call for intellectuals to unite and later informed readers about broader resistance activities. It, too, occasionally included poems by Aragon, under different pseudonyms.

Éluard was slower to embrace resistance, with
Livre ouvert
(Open Book), a collection published privately by
Cahiers d’Art
in 1941, reflecting his gloom. He also published some poems for Seghers’s
Poésie ’41
. One typical verse read: “I don’t hear the monsters speak / I know them they’ve said everything.” Then, in June 1942,
Fontaine
, in Algiers, published what would become the best-known French poem of the war years, “Liberté.” If it resembles a love poem, it is because Éluard first wrote it for his wife, Nusch, under the title of “Une Seule pensée” (A Single Thought). And it was authorized for publication only because Vichy’s censors in Algiers did not read the full poem. In twenty-one four-line stanzas, Éluard describes the delights of life, from his school days to his travels, from moments of sickness to others of love. And, as celebration, he ends twenty of the verses with the words “I write your name.” But in
Fontaine
’s text, instead of naming Nusch, he changed the last word of the poem:

And through the power of one word
I restart my life
I was born to know you
To name you—Freedom.

Three months later, Éluard included “Liberté” in a collection of poems published privately in Paris. More importantly, Fouchet sent
a copy of the poem to London, where it was printed on single sheets by the Gaullist
Revue du Monde Libre;
the RAF then dropped tens of thousands of these over occupied France.

In late 1942, having returned to the Communist Party, Éluard joined the CNE and soon afterward wrote an homage to Paris for
Les Lettres Françaises
called “Courage.” It opens:

Paris is cold Paris is hungry
Paris no longer eats chestnuts in the street
Paris is wearing yesterday’s old clothes
Paris sleeps standing airless in the
métro
.

In April 1943, Bruller recruited Éluard to prepare Éditions de Minuit’s first poetry anthology,
L’Honneur des poètes
(The Honor of Poets). Among its twenty-two authors were Aragon, Seghers, Thomas, Tavernier, Bruller and Éluard himself, as well as three POWs, all using pseudonyms. In an unsigned preface, Éluard wrote, “In face of the peril confronting humanity today, we poets have come together from all corners of French territory. Under threat, poetry once again regroups, it finds anew a precise meaning to its latent violence, it cries out, accuses, waits.”
¹⁵
In May 1944, while now spending much of his time in hiding, Éluard was able to edit another collection,
Europe
, for Éditions de Minuit; it included poems by many of the same
résistants
as well as those written by poets in other occupied countries.

One unusual book published by Bruller was
33 sonnets composés au secret
(33 Sonnets Composed in Solitary Confinement), attributed to Jean Noir. The poems had, in fact, been written by Jean Cassou, the modern art curator who had fled Paris after the Germans broke up the Musée de l’Homme network in 1941. He continued his resistance activities in Toulouse, where he was arrested by French police in December 1941. He was released in February 1942, but soon afterward returned to jail until early 1943, when he could finally rejoin the resistance. It was during his first stretch behind bars that he composed these sonnets in his head, memorizing them until the last few days of his detention, when he was finally given pencil and paper. “For those two months I had composed half a sonnet a night,” he recalled years later.

In May 1944, Cassou’s sonnets, dedicated to “My companions of
prisons,” were published by Éditions de Minuit. The lengthy introduction by Aragon, as François La Colère, added drama to Cassou’s achievement: “On this night when the prisoner absolutely refuses to acknowledge hunger, thirst, cold, the pain of indignity, the humiliation of man by man, the poem is his great act of defiance thrown at the contempt that he suffers. The poem is his superhuman effort to remain a human being, to reach those regions of mind and heart which everything around him denies and debases.”
¹⁶

While later proclaimed as “sonnets of the resistance,” the poems are in fact more sonnets than resistance, reflecting the scattered memories, images and thoughts coming to a man in prison in the solitude of the night. In one sonnet, the sounds he hears mix with those he remembers.

Life’s distant sounds, celestial, tucked away;
Horns hooting, children going home to tea,
The church bells pealing for a festal day,
Cars blindly heading for infinity.
¹⁷