On page 26 of Lottman's extraordinary memoir, one learns how, in January of 1935 André Gide and André Malraux traveled to Berlin, to ask Goebbels to liberate Georgi Dimitrov. Section head of the Comintern for Germany, he'd been arrested in connection with the burning of the Reichstag. Goebbels didn't receive them, but they left a letter with his secretary, and Dimitrov was eventually released.
Later that same year, Romain Rolland went to Moscow to plead with Stalin to free the journalist/novelist Victor Serge. The plight of Serge, interned in a labor camp in Siberia, had created an uproar in the debates between hard-line Communists and left-wing liberals at the famous International Writers Conference, held in the Mutualité auditorium in Paris in June of 1935. Stalin agreed to do so as soon as a country could be found that would accept him. After his release Serge ended up in Mexico, where he died in 1947.
The readiness with which despots and their agents were able to make such token gesture stands in contrast to the too hastily acquired self-satisfaction in the hearts of these writers who believed that their international prestige, could seriously influence the course of world events.
It may be that no dictator in history has been cleverer than Josef Stalin in his exploitation of the writer's bottomless hunger for recognition, for his or her need to see themselves as modern-day prophets preaching salvation to mankind.
I should know: I'm one of them.
During and after the Occupation, not a few among the writers of the tight circle living in the Parisian Left Bank, lamented their "failure" in staving off the German victory. Gide, as per usual, was more subtle in his analysis; yet in his journal entries published in Algeria in 1944, he alludes to a moral defect in the French mentality whereby it was unable to be unified against the common threat (Lottman, pg. 130). Once again one has the sense that the denizens of the world's most famous intellectual ghetto were ashamed that they had not used their extraordinary power in the right way!
Speaking of the Nouvelle Revue Française, the most important literary magazine in France between the 20's and the 50's, the editor Emanuel Berl had this to say:
In the period between the wars, there were two institutions that served as the dominant sounding-boards for the exponentially reinforced messages of the echo chamber: the Nouvelle Revue Française, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure .
The NRF was launched and funded by André Gide and his associates in the early years of the 20th century, with a programme not dissimilar to that which led to the founding ofFerment in the 1980's: to provide an outlet for creative writers and thinkers in rebellion against the stranglehold which the academy and the tabloid press held letters and opinion in France. The NRF produced 30 issues before it found its publisher in Gaston Gallimard.
The other sounding-board was supplied by the universal presence of graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, or ENS. This applies not only to literature, but to the personnel of all political institutions and education. Originally set up between the Revolution and the reign of Napoleon as a normal school for turning out faculty for public education, it developed after the 1870's into an elite college for the formation of the leading figures in every area of administration, letters, education and science. In the first part of the 20th century it supplied most of the leading figures in the sciences and the humanities - the two branches being kept strictly apart in a kind of gross caricature of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" paradigm that continues to have a deleterious effect on French society.
Adolescent friendships cemented at the ENS were frequently life-long, surviving both wars and political differences. The same was true, in its own way, of the major writers of the NRF. Thus, normaliens Raymond Aron, Jean Guéhenno, and Jean-Paul Sartre (respectively a rightist, pacifist, and Marxist) all graduates of the ENS, or André Malraux, Pierre Drieu-la-Rochelle and Jean Paulhan (respectively fickle revolutionary, fascist and resistance fighter), writers and editors of the NRF ,remained friends all through the Occupation, even to the point of coming to one another's assistance when their lives were imperiled.
Both before and after the war, the echo chamber effect was sustained at all levels by the cross-fertilization of these two institutions. These writers published one another's works, wrote reviews of each others' books in the magazines edited by other members of the same narrow clique. It was unavoidable that they would believe that they spoke for world opinion, that even dictators would tremble at the latent power in their pens.
I understand all of this very well. A writer without an echo chamber feels completely lost. Contrary to the common wisdom, a writer gives much more attention to the opinions of his or her peers, than he does to the reading public. Someone like Salman Rushdie , say, or Vaclav Havel, is far more interested in what some reviewer has to say about their novels in the New York Review of Books, than in the views of a college sophomore ( no slur intended; we've all been college sophomores) to whom they are assigned reading in a literature course.
A writer outside the echo chamber feels as if he's shouting to the walls, as if his words are being blown away by the winds. The reading public plays important roles, both intellectually and financially; yet writers are less dependent on their readers than they are on a circle of personal and professional associates who echo their thoughts, odes, rhapsodies, lyrics, insights, recommendations, prognostications ...
Look at me. Ferment Magazine now receives between 40,000 and 50,000 hits a month. I'm very pleased with this, although I only occasionally receive an E-mail or postcard from anyone commenting or my work, or sharing his or her thoughts. No matter: my incentive to continue in this thankless profession comes from peers whose opinion I respect: writers, editors, actors, composers, musicians political organizers, teachers, scientists, and acquaintances engaged in similar activities. They are the constitutive entities of my echo chamber, as I am one in theirs. We continue to prevail in the face of public indifference, confident that we are not only right in hanging on, but that we are making a real difference in the world, that we are changing history for the better!
Now imagine this phenomenon magnified a hundred times. It begins in the young writer's elite high schools and college: the Lycée Louis le Grand, the Lycée Henri IV, the ENS. The government, the educational system, one's teachers, history itself, are unanimous in proclaiming that one is uniquely important, that one is destined to lead the nation, ( which, since it is the nation of thinkers, is destined to lead all mankind) to its golden future, or at least to warn it away from the abyss.
One shares similar sentiments with one's personal friends, colleagues, associates, all from the same schools. The publishing houses which will produce and promote one's books, which will give one a job as an editor, which will underwrite the magazines that will review them, are mostly managed by the alumni of these same schools. From the world of the rue d'Ulm, where the ENS is located, it can't be more than a mile to the few blocks in the village of St. Germain des Pres, the rue du Bac, rue Vaneau, rue de Beaune, rue du Dragon, where one finds the prestigious publishing houses, Gallimard, Grasset and a few others, and the apartments in which one has to live to be within walking distance of ones publisher. With luck one's entire career can be spent here, in the climate of echoing reverberation large enough to encompass the entire planet!
Is it surprising that the Lonely Crowd living, writing and working within a few blocks distance from the Café Flore, the Café des Deux Magots, and the Brasserie Lipp could , under the magic spell of the strong positive feedback in the echo chamber of their own making, delude themselves in the belief that their collective voice could stop both Hitler and Stalin; or that, when the despots did triumph, it was because of their own failure?
The reader who detects a note of carping envy in these reflections is justified in doing so!