La Fontaine – Post-War Avant Journal

Fontaine:  Revue mensuelle de la poésie et des lettres français, Vol. X, No. 58, March 1947. Softcover octavo, 168 pp.

The magazine Fontaine seems to held a position in post-WWII French culture analogous in some ways to October today a kind of threshold between truly radical culture and the academic world ready to absorb it. One hand it contains work by and about Breton, Eluard and Reverdy, for example; yet this is by no means imply as definite a stance as it might have thirty years earlier, and the commentary on them is distanced from their intellectual struggles in a way which marks its distance from a committed avant-garde journal. It is an interesting document of post-War French culture in the process of regeneration (were the editors aware of the collaboration of Heidegger, published here, in the Nazi regime?); for instance D. de Rougement provides a thinly redacted journal of "An Intellectual in Exile" that provides a sometimes scathing picture of the war-time New York avant-garde through the eyes of their refugee European counterparts (it also contains Breton's famous dubbing of Dali as "Avida Dollars"). The many adverts, as always, give a fascinating glimpse as well, revealing among other things an interest in English nonsense poetry with new translations of both Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.