In the new biography of Sartre by Annie Cohen-Solal, I came upon the following line, which gave me an almost Proustian shock of pleasure and total recall: “[in 1948] the excellent review, Yale French Studies, devoted a whole issue to Sartre and existentialism.” Those were the years . . . What a haven Yale was for a young literary person then! Fresh out of World War II, we were eager to make up for lost time. Henri Peyre—who loves to reminisce about that generation—gave us his southern French warmth, his brilliance, his immense erudition. Out of a desire to give something back, I proposed that we graduate students start a magazine, on a shoestring, and since existentialism was in the transatlantic air, that was our first issue. It soon had to be reprinted.
I ran the founding number and the next one, “Modern Poets.” On the banana-yellow cover (Richard Wilbur pronounced it “succulent”) appeared names like Sartre (he sent us his then unpublished play, Les Mains sales), Henri Peyre, and Wallace Fowlie. Roger Shattuck, home from flying the “hump,” gave us Apollinaire translations; Richard Wilbur sent down Englishings of Villiers from Harvard; Richard Ellmann offered us Michaux; Pierre Schneider did an article (his first) on Valéry and automatic writing.
I could go on, but enough. It is enough to make a man weep, especially when he thinks of what came after—after roughly 1968, that is.
Despite the gathering fog, the growing chill of
