establish a fact and remain free, in case one wishes to remedy affairs, to go back to the beginning. Under an apparent innocence which will deceive only grown-ups, Radiguet seems cold, master of himself, astonishingly precocious (perhaps he is normal and we naïve, slow to develop?) disabused, mistrustful, rational, and a hedonist. Our reactions toward him are those of the father who, in Le Diable au Corps, seems angry and supine. Associations of French veterans have written to the American Legion to warn your public against this immoral work; all the protests will change nothing; Le Diable au Corps is an "unpleasant" book, but one which deserves to be read. The faults I find with it are exterior faults, the attempt to manufacture a masterpiece by following these receipts: a transparent plot, a serene style, a composition without errors. It is a fashion and I mention it because it is spreading to a whole group of young writers, under the influence of Gide, although Gide himself is not directly responsible. The end of art is indeed serenity and economy of means, but only after the sacrifice. To reconstruct masterpieces synthetically is a mistake. Time acts on a book to make it seem perfect, but these writers offer to take the place of time. The haste is unseemly which delivers us masterpieces a hundred years too soon. They make us think of a general who says to his enemies, "Retreat, you can see that I have won the battle." The enemy might answer, "Not at all. The battle is still to be fought, and to begin it we make you our prisoner." A writer's first duty is to live his books or at least his style; on this subject Emerson has made excellent observations.
I was thinking of this yesterday as I watched, during the course of a party—a "Montmartre rag," which Darius Milhaud and I were giving to end the season, before our friends dispersed, laden with pencils and fountain pens and paper and white canvases, toward countryside and inspiration—as I watched the young generation, monocled, implacable, which stood in the doorways without offering to dance, and which was not amused. I said also, to comfort myself, making a rapid inventory, that we had a fine lot of fresh and powerful talents: painters like Picasso, Braque, Segonzac, L. A. Moreau, Favory, Dufy, Pascin, La Fresnaye, Lhote, Leger; women who paint deliciously—Marie Laurencin, Hélène Perdriat, Marval, Irène Lagut; sculptors like Lipschitz, Archipenko, Brancusi; young writers like Cendrars, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Larbaud,
