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in the grand hall of the Aquitania on the Atlantic, or
in an airplane volplaning felicitously down on Warsaw.
The literature of Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul
Eluard, Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara is an exhilarating
record. Tzara’s poems are as naturally expressive of the
beauty of this age as Herrick’s are of the 17 th Century.
With an utterly simple and unaffected touch they employ
all the instruments of the time, the streetcar, the bill
poster, the automobile, the incandescent light, etc. The
poems are not modern because they indicate: „I was
riding in the tramway" (instead of a diligence), but
because the tramway gets into the very rhythm, form
and texture of the poems.
In the prose of Louis Aragon there is the speed and
vividness of the motion picture, a constant and uproarious
dialectic, and a volume and richness that is quite
distinguished after so much thin and lucid French prose.
The humor is not of human foibles so much as of
smoothly functioning swiftly moving modern devices.
The influences of the up-to-date detective and the
American cinema are strongly evident. There are marvel
ous American films whose characters, out of all the
sincerity of the director’s heart, make the most pre
posterous, imbecilic and imaginative gestures. There is
much of this terrifying beauty in Aragon’s stories.
Les Champs Magnétiques, which André Breton and
Philippe Soupault wrote in collaboration is another com
manding book of prose. It rejects plot as completely
as Joyce’s Ulysses does, but goes even farther in
disavowing even such a precise and inchoate verisimilitude
as Joyce employs. The book achieves an upheaval of
methods. Take a single sentence or a paragraph and
it is, alone, rich-and-beautiful, but means nothing without
its context. For the writers instead of attempting to
express human drama by definite words or phrases
indicating so many incidents or details, work for an
effect of growth in their theme by a large continued
rhythm. The prose changes its blend and intensity of
light, spatters its broken tracts of conversation or cogita
tion, gathering a large momentum through the succession
of chapters rather than sentences. This is simply another
case of literature coming abreast of modern painting
or sculpture or music.