PARIS, February 1966

My nineteenth trip to France, and the reasons for coming here are the same as they were on the first trip, in 1928, when I was nineteen: to use French as my daily language, and to become acquainted with what is new and significant in the Paris literary scene. In 1928, when I lived in Montparnasse, I faithfully read the sixteenth-century poets for my course with Professor Chamard at the Sorbonne, and I was totally unaware of the surrealist activities going on exactly at that time at Le Dome and La Coupole, La Rotonde and Le Select, which I passed every day. And since that time, whenever I teach the poems of Du Bellay, Ronsard, and Maurice Scève, I think of that impressive figure of Professor Chamard with his white beard, carefully enunciating his course in the Amphitheatre Richelieu. And also, when I try to teach the theories of André Breton and the poems of Robert Desnos, I recall my ignorance and innocence of 1928, when I was living in close proximity to those young men, not very much older than myself, who were actively formulating and demonstrating a literary movement that has held my attention ever since 1947, when Dean McKeon at the University of Chicago asked me to prepare a public course of lectures and gave me exactly two minutes in which to choose the subject. I blurted out "surrealism" because I was most ignorant of that aspect of the twentieth century!