Word: lottman
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...Left Bank, a fascinating study of writers, artists and politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War. Herbert Lottman shows--among other things--that Pasternak was right. Organization did living on, in a sense, the death of art; those writers who joined forces in the 1930s against the Nazis produced few lasting works, while the loners, like Jean-Paul Sartre or the anti-semitic Louis-Ferdinand Celine, continued to create masterworks. It is a disturbing correlation that Lottman serves up without comment for his reader to ponder...
...fact, Lottman himself remains scrupulously objective and un-engaged throughout The Left Bank Aside from an occasional snide remarks--for example, writing about rightist author Pierre Drieu La Rochelle: "Drieu's biography reads like fiction, which is why it can be preferred to his own books" and an at times unflattering portrait of Malraux Lottman refuses to editorialize. Instead, he paints a marvelously detailed picture of the writers and artists of Paris's Left Bank, their milieu and the confused, often ambiguous way they dealt with the events of their time...
...LEFT BANK--"that narrow strip of old houses and older streets along the Seine"--was the center of the intellectual world during the period Lottman describes. The doings and sayings of those who congregated in the cafes of Saint German and Saint Michel, bantered in the salons and worked in every conceivable place took on an importance clearly disproportionate to the quality of what was produced. Politics, and not art, was the object of many a writer's energy...
...then quickly, as Lottman shows, it was over Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact, alienating the communists from the rest of the Left. Even without the "communist dilemma," the intelligentsia was split between those who wanted to fight fascism and those whose most fervent desire was to avoid war. And in the end, words were no match for German guns' Paris fell and with it unity...
...element in particular stands out from Lottman's engrossing account of the pre-war years: the Left Bank's love affair with the USSR. Natively, like star-struck high schoolers, a whole generation of writers fell for Stalin's brand of communism. If anything, this affliction recalls the admiration for Hanoi many anti-Vietnam war activists expressed during the 1960's. Like so many Susan Sontags, the Left Bankers would make a pilgrimage to their Mecca--and return full of hope that France too would find...