The Solitude of Compassion Read Online Free

there are always wonderful accounts of eating and drinking. Sometimes it is a feast, as in The Joy of Man’s Desiring , sometimes it is a simple repast. Whatever it be, it makes one’s mouth water. (There still remains to be written, by an American for Americans, a cookbook based on the recipes gleaned from the pages of French literature.) Every cinéaste has observed the prominence given by French film directors to eating and drinking. It is a feature conspicuously
absent in American movies. When we have such a scene it is seldom real, neither the food nor the participants. In France, whenever two or more come together there is sensual as well as spiritual communion. With what longing American youths look at these scenes. Often it is a repast al fresco. Then are we even more moved, for truly we know little of the joy of eating and drinking outdoors. The Frenchman “loves” his food. We take food for nourishment or because we are unable to dispense with the habit. The Frenchman, even if he is a man of the cities, is closer to the soil than the American. He does not tamper with or refine away the products of the soil. He relishes the homely meals as much as the creations of the gourmet. He likes things fresh, not canned or refrigerated. And almost every Frenchman knows how to cook. I have never met a Frenchman who did not know how to make such a simple thing as an omelette, for example. But I know plenty of Americans who cannot even boil an egg.
    Naturally, with good food goes good conversation, another element completely lacking in our country. To have good conversation it is almost imperative to have good wine with the meal. Not cocktails, not whisky, not cold beer or ale. Ah, the wines! The variety of them, the subtle, indescribable effects they produce! And let me not forget that with good food goes beautiful women—women who, in addition to stimulating one’s appetite, know how to inspire good conversation. How horrible are our banquets for men only! How we love to castrate, to mutilate ourselves! How we really loathe all that is sensuous and sensual! I believe most earnestly that what repels Americans more than immorality is the pleasure to be derived from the enjoyment of the five senses. We are not a “moral” people by any means. We do not need to read La Peau by Malaparte to discover what beasts are hidden beneath our chivalric uniforms. And when
I say “uniforms” I mean the garb which disguises the civilian as well as that which disguises the soldier. We are men in uniform through and through. We are not individuals, neither are we members of a great collectivity. We are neither democrats, communists, socialists nor anarchists. We are an unruly mob. And the sign by which we are known is vulgarity.
    There is never vulgarity in even the coarsest pages of Giono. There may be lust, carnality, sensuality—but not vulgarity. His characters may indulge in sexual intercourse occasionally, they may even be said to “fornicate,” but in these indulgences there is never anything horripilating as in Malaparte’s descriptions of American soldiers abroad. Never is a French writer obliged to resort to the mannerisms of Lawrence in a book such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover . Lawrence should have known Giono, with whom he has much in common, by the way. He should have travelled up from Vence to the plateau of Haute-Provence where describing the setting of Colline , Giono says: “an endless waste of blue earth, village after village lying in death on the lavender tableland. A handful of men, how pitifully few, how ineffectual! And, crouching amid the grasses, wallowing in the reeds—the hill, like a bull.” But Lawrence was then already in the grip of death, able nevertheless to give us The Man Who Died or The Escaped Cock . Still enough breath in him, as it were, to reject the sickly Christian image of a suffering Redeemer and restore the image of man in flesh