LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

man would CHANGE his thought or withdraw a line of his writing for
ulterior motives.
That was the vanishing world, that was old France. One of Gourmont’s
friends, La Marquise de Pierre, had never before seen an American. She
looked on me as the representative of Benjamin Franklin. The United
States was still the land that Lafayette went to. I went up her stairs and
was received as if I had been a flamingo or sortie other rare exotic. That
old France is NO longer with us.
Now after my study of the real poets, from Gautier onward, I dropped
into Paris in, I think, 1919 and I asked what was doing. And they told me
a lot, some of it hooey, but nobody mentioned Cocteau. Only after six
weeks did someone say, after I had refused a lot of dog biscuit writing,
as NOT what I was lookin’ for, oh, well, there is Cocteau. Just as some
years before a Harvard man entered my hail bedroom, if you could call it
HALL, and told me about American writing and, when I declined to eat
it, he added, oh, well, there is Eliot. I thought the isolation of Jean
Cocteau indicated some nastiness on the part of his colleagues, but
didn’t notice their stud book.
Jean had his own particular line. Not everyone could be expected to like
it, but he was way and by far the BEST poet and best prose writer then
livin’ in Paris. Only real criticism of his limits came from Picabia, who
had on his own part limits. Curiously enough (details extraneous to my
present subject) ten years later the best new writer in Paris was René
Crevel. Les Pieds dans le Plat. Have you read it? When he died, I
expected to see his contemporaries make a fuss, and lament him. They
did NOT.
I had thought by then I could draw back and do my own stuff and leave
funeral services and criticism of the young to the new generation. Not a
bit of it. After hemmin’ and hawing, and waitin’ I had to lay a wreathe
on Crevel. Nigh coincided with the demise of Possum’s Criterion. Well