"Beautiful Hole"

From Tokyo there landed at San Francisco last week the great, the inexplicable Paul Claudel, who hurried at once to Washington accompanied by his daughter Reine. For six years he has been French Ambassador to Japan, always manifesting himself in strange ways and at strange moments. Now he comes as Ambassador to Washington. Eventually, some will discuss with him War debts, some will look up his odes, many will feel his charm, his strength; but few will understand his genius.

Perhaps the best way to understand is to enter the dim, vaulted portal of Notre Dame de Paris with young Paul Claudel at vespers time on Christmas Day, 1886.

This hot-blood from Picardy was wrestling then in his soul, between the relentless, earthy doctrines of Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, and a certain stirring of religious mysticism within him which he had tried in vain to sully, down, and conquer by debauch. Perhaps in the young man's troubled mind Death and God seemed strangely opposed, for he had just come from the sick bed of a favorite grandfather, then dying of cancer of the stomach.

The Latin vespers' chant rose majestic and sonorous. Notre Dame seemed every moment less a church of man, and more the infinite, spacious House of God. Then Paul Claudel was suddenly upon his knees. . . . "Alors se produisit," he has said, "I'evenement qui domine tout ana vie. This, of all my life, was the dominant moment. My heart was touched. Je crus--I believed! . . . Blinding, ineffable, had come the revelation. I had realized the heart-rending innocence, the eternal childhood of God."

Three years more Paul Claudel waited, questioning himself, then he entered wholly, passionately the Roman Catholic Church. The perfume of censers and the deep thoughtful twilight of cathedrals began to mingle strangely with the keen and originally hated wit of this great young writer--for Paul Claudel rapidly became, and is still, one of the foremost poets and dramatists of France.

"Admired by some, detested by others, discussed by all," such was and is the fate of his genius. Germans discovered it early and compared M. Claudel to Goethe. Britons are coming to admit, at last, that Paul Claudel, though he is often as obscure as Shakespeare could be, has also some of the bard's creative imagination. Frenchmen are still of two minds about Claudel. "Ha!" snorted once, reputedly, M. Clemenceau, "he writes like a holy ghost--when did France ever have such an Ambassador?"

Indeed the diplomatic career of Paul Claudel is totally anomalous. Who has heard before of a mystic-Vice Consul (New York, 1893; Boston, 1894), of a poet-- Consul (Shanghai, Foochow, Tienstin, Prague, Frankfort-On-Main and Hamburg until 1914), finally who ever heard of an active play-wright/- as Minister to Brazil (1916), to Denmark (1919) and finally Ambassador to Japan since 1921? The man is a reductio ad paradoxa.

These last years of Paul Claudel have been a little baffling to the Japanese. Here was a hard, shrewd statesman of the first rank who would draw a shapeless caricature for his dinner partner and remark with emphatic sincerity: "Madame, I would give my whole position and perhaps half my talent could I learn to draw or sculp."

Daily he spent hours with a Japanese sculptor, and later with a Japanese musician. To the one Paul Claudel tried to describe the strange forms and shapes that stir in his mind. To the other he talked of tones and tunes never perhaps to be heard. The sculptor and the musician did the best they could; and, it is said, eased somewhat Paul Claudel's thirst to create, even in mediums where his keen mind tells him that he has neither talent nor skill.

Of Paul Claudel a close friend has said: "His thoughts as he expresses them are extremely difficult to understand. ... He fashions words out of Latin and Greek roots, picks them out of all sorts of strange places, until you seem to be wafted on a bright, flying carpet woven all of butterflies."

Manhattan knows Paul Claudel because the Swedish Ballet Company danced his Man and His Desire just off blatant Broadway, three years ago; and recently the Theatre Guild produced his Tidings Brought To Mary.

Speaking from stout Saxon roots to Kansas Cityites, last week, M. Claudel said: "The Grand Canyon which I have just visited, is indeed a Hell of a hole, the most beautiful I've ever seen."

*The East I Know, Three Poems of the War.

/- The Tidings 'Brought to Mary, The Hostage, Dry Bread, Rest on the Seventh Day.