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VOLUME 1 | NUMBER 1 REVIEW contents 5 Jean-Paul Sartre: After Budapest 24 Samuel Beckett: Dante and the Lobster 37 Henri Michaux: Miserable Miracle 68 Michael Hamburger: Georg Büchner 98 Harold Feinstein: Eight Photographs 99 James Purdy: Cutting Edge 110 Baby Dodds' Story: As Told to Larry Gara 149 Mark Schorer: On Lady Chatterley's Lover 179 Samuel Beckett: Echo's Bones Cover photograph by Harold Feinstein Contributors SAMUEL BECKETT was born in Dublin, but he now lives in Paris and writes in French, although his earlier work was written in English. "Dante and the Lobster" first appeared in Edward Titus' This Quarter in 1930; and Echo's Bones was published by George Reavey's Europa Press in 1932. WARREN "BABY" DODDS, outstanding exponent of New Orleans drumming, has played, during his long career, with such jazz greats as his brother, Johnny Dodds, King Oliver, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet. HAROLD FEINSTEIN'S photographs have been shown and published in Europe and America, and he is represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. LARRY GARA is Assistant Professor of History at Eureka College, in Illinois. His life of Cyrus Woodman, Westernized Yankee, was recently published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. MICHAEL HAMBURGER, poet and critic, holds the post of Lecturer in German at Reading University. His essay on Büchner is from his Reason and Energy: Studies in Modern German Literature, which Grove Press will publish in the fall of 1957. HENRI MICHAUX, poet and painter, was born in Belgium in 1899, and has lived most of his life in Paris. Miserable Miracle is his most recent book. JAMES PURDY says of himself: "I am 33, was born in Ohio, and attended the University of Chicago and universities in Mexico. At present I am writing a novel and have begun work on a play." JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, leader of the Existentialist school of philosophy, was born in Paris in 1905. He has written plays, novels, critical studies, and important philosophical works. He is the editor of the review, Les Temps Modernes. MARK SCHORER, critic and novelist, has been working on a book about D. H. Lawrence for several years. He is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. LOUISE VARESE, the translator of Michaux's Miserable Miracle, is best known for her translations of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, St.-John Perse, and Valéry. She is the wife of Edgar Varèse, the composer . JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: After Budapest [Jean-Paul Sartre's leading position amongst French intellectuals lends a special significance to his reactions to Russian intervention in Hungary and to his analysis of the present situation in leftwing politics in France today. The following interview with Sartre was first published in the Paris Express, November 9, 1956.] How did you learn of the events in Hungary and what were your first reactions? My first reaction, anguish; there was this unbelievable error: the request for intervention by Russian troops, and no one knew as yet whether it was the last Rakosi-ist or the new Hungarian government which was responsible. After a few days, anguish gave way to hope and even joy; although the Russian command--which we had just learned was called in by Gero--had committed the criminal clumsiness of answering this call, it had then withdrawn its troops from Budapest. We saw Soviet regiments withdrawing before the insurgents rather than fire on them; Russian soldiers deserting. The Kremlin seemed hesitant: it seemed as if the insurgents were going to win. Perhaps, in spite of this first terrible bloodshed, the Soviet Union wanted to resort to negotiations like those in Poland. The anguish returned immediately after, more intense each day: it did not leave me with the emergence from prison on to the world scene of Cardinal Mindszenty. I thought: the USSR will be put on the spot: their Cardinal was returned to them; what about Horthy and integration with the Western Evergreen Review powers? The Russians will have to abandon Hungary or resume the massacres. The neutrality asked for by Nagy was obviously only a minimum demand made under pressure of the insurgents and which would not satisfy them. The return to the old parties, the hunt for members of the secret police and, undoubtedly, also of the Communist party workers, the return of the émigrés, the appearance of "suppressed local émigrés," the possible existence of a reactionary conspiracy in the army, all this showed that the Hungarian revolt was aiming at a complete liquidation of what is called the socialist foundations of the regime. It was this tragic situation which one of the last members of the Nagy government described on Radio Budapest: "We are caught between the menace of a return of the reactionaries and that of a foreign occupation. This is what caused the Russian intervention. This is the explanation." But an explanation is not an excuse: from any angle, the intervention was a crime. And it is an abject lie to claim that the workers are fighting at the side of the Soviet troops. Listen rather to the appeals of Kadar, last night: "Workers, help us! ...Workers and peasants, fight with us! The Communist party is going through the most tragic phase of its history. We are breaking with the past; moreover, we have changed the name of the party." Would these appeals be necessary if everyone was supporting the insurgents? If the workers and the peasants, after having "manifested their legitimate discontent," to quote Pravda, had joined with the Nagy government to push back the émigrés, there probably would have been a civil war; however, not one dispatch, not one radio report, even in the popular democracies, made mention of a civil war. All is confusion and instability among the insurgent groups popping up everywhere. Among these groups, united in their fight against the Soviets and in their demand for withdrawal, appeared reactionary elements and some which were foreign inspired. But the SARTRE—After Budapest fact is there: workers, peasants, the entire populace fought at their side. The advanced Communist element, moved by the wish to democratize the regime, coexisted with the reactionaries in the same groups which contained, at the same time, many other tendencies and which seesawed from one side to the other in reaction to events, to changes in membership of the groups and, finally, to the Russian intervention. In a word, it was on the entire population and not on a handful of armed émigrés that the Red Army was going to fire. It is the people, the workers and the peasants-the former victims of Horthy- -who are still being massacred today. The crime, for me, is not only the attack on Budapest by the tanks, it is that it was made possible and perhaps necessary (from the Soviet point of view naturally) by twelve years of terror and stupidity. If the right was predominant among most of the insurgents it is because they all shared one passion, completely negative: hatred of the Soviets and of Rakosi-ism. Those hunts in the sewers were horrible: as though it was necessary for the regime to make itself hated! Aside from a conscious minority--the intellectuals, the union of writers--quickly ignored by the masses, the workers and the peasants, after having recited their lessons learned by rote, found themselves in complete confusion, with no political or social education. Generally, popular revolutions are leftist. For the first time-- though everything is new in these tragic events--we have seen a political revolution evolving to the right. Why? Because nothing had been given to the people, neither material satisfaction nor a socialist faith, not even a clear viewpoint of the situation. The people were certainly mistaken, but even in their errors they have the right to liberty and respect: workers free themselves by means of errors, of experiments; errors are not corrected by cannon fire. Stalinism is entirely responsible for these very errors. Evergreen Review The right claims that the Hungarian agony constitutes a definite defeat for socialism. What do you think? What the Hungarian people are teaching us with their blood is the complete failure of socialism as a Soviet-imported product. We know what socialism has cost the Soviet Union: the sweat, the blood, the crimes, also the courage, and the perseverance. But the country was also able to raise itself to the top rank of industrial powers. That is because historical conditions allowed it; the Communists of 1917 were taking over from a bourgeoisie which was not yet fully developed, but which had laid the foundations of a strong industrial complex. It was absolutely absurd to impose a servile imitation of the Stalin type of organization on each satellite country in order to make it a USSR plaything, a small-scale model, without taking into account the difference in situations.