“THE SWIFT FLOW OF THINGS”: FROM THE PARIS JOURNALS, 1947–1948

Abstract

3 9 R ‘ ‘ T H E S W I F T F L O W O F T H I N G S ’ ’ F R O M T H E P A R I S J O U R N A L S , 1 9 4 7 — 1 9 4 8 R O G E R S H A T T U C K Edited and Introduced by Jed Perl When Roger Shattuck died in 2005 at the age of eighty-two, he left behind not only classic studies of modern culture and society, including The Banquet Years and Forbidden Knowledge, but also a journal that he had kept for more than fifty years. The journal, written in a miniscule, angular hand by no means easy to decipher, ranges from Shattuck’s early experiences in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater during World War II through his last years living in Vermont, and encompasses love a√airs, friendships, travels in the United States, Europe, and Africa, and the composition of his many books. Writing in a spirit by turns unabashedly introspective and soberly journalistic, Shattuck aimed to produce a record not only of his own life but of the life of his times. The range of the work suggests comparisons with the journals of Edmund Wilson, a writer Shattuck admired. No one has as yet made a thorough examination of this enormous manuscript, which his widow, Nora Shattuck, has given to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where Shattuck taught in the 1960s. What follows is a first glimpse of Shattuck’s journals, a selection of entries from a period spent in Paris, from August 1947 to July 1948. Shattuck had graduated from Yale in the spring of 1947, and he 4 0 S H A T T U C K Y celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday a week before writing the first words included here. In Paris he worked on film projects at unesco for a time and began the investigations of Apollinaire and French culture that would lead to the publication of The Banquet Years a decade later. He had already, back in the United States, become romantically involved with a young Canadian dancer, Nora White, who was with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, appearing as the Cowgirl in Agnes DeMille’s Rodeo as well as in many works by George Balanchine. She arrived in France in May 1948, and the last entries here describe a deepening romance that would lead to an enduring marriage. (The initial transcriptions were done by Julio Torres. Nora Shattuck, Jessica Marglin, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, and Deborah Rosenthal helped with various problems in transcription and translation. Although it has been di≈cult to identify some of the people Shattuck mentions, I have added notes of clarification wherever possible.) August 28, 1947 A pilot flying an instrument can set his gyro compass on zero for any magnetic heading in order to make the heading easy to read. Thus he arbitrarily picks his heading as the axis or absolute to which all will be referred, deserting for the instant the mere conventional north. However he must be careful and reset his gyro or it will deviate slowly because of the flaws of the mechanism itself, and then from time to time he must acknowledge his ultimate reference to true north. It is in these terms that our culture seems to understand ‘‘normal ,’’ a term as arbitrary as a zero on a compass that can be set at will or as a north which refers to the axis of one tiny planet in a whole heaven of stars. My recent studies in sociology and anthropology show how one’s social values and norms are narrow when viewed in any perspective in comparison to other cultures. We now set our gyros on zero and have steered pretty blindly on this course. How we originally picked the course is hard to tell, but the steering mechanism has slowly crept around the dial, leading us all over the sky but thinking that we are always steering ‘‘normal’’ or zero. The reason, of course, is that we have...