What Constitutes Peace?

There is grandeur in war, even in its evil; and just now someone might say that the subject matter of this school of painting is very little, petty, inconsequential. . . . But. . . .

Last week two of the more gifted novelists of recent years made art news of a decidedly choice sort. One was the 45-year-old, German-born, U.S.-citizen-to-be, Author Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front). He lent Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries, for non-commercial exhibition, his fastidiously chosen collection of modern and 19th-Century French art.

Fifteen years after the publication of his historic novel, Erich Maria Remarque is a retiring, deep-voiced, powerfully built man who enjoys his collections of antique Persian rugs and Chinese figurines as much as his French pictures. For four years he has moved his collections through a series of U.S. hotels and rented houses. The works are casually placed around his rooms, and never hung or lighted in a rigor mortis of possessiveness. Remarque lets his dogs sleep on three or four thicknesses of rare rugs.

He is now working on his fifth novel, a psychological story about prewar Paris. He does not think of himself as a refugee. When he gets his final citizenship papers he plans to settle in or near Manhattan.

The other novelist involved in the show was the 42-year-old, Wisconsin-born, Left Banker-that-was, Glenway Wescott (The Grandmothers, The Pilgrim Hawk). For the catalogue of the Remarque collection he wrote an eminently quotable introduction :

. . . The littleness of these pictures is what we shall have to live for again, when the war is done. In the experience of every man, every day, it is what constitutes peace. A grandmother seated in a doorway, dreaming in retrospect; the flying step of a dancer across a stage, like a festive honeybee; a watery cloud breathing over a hill; cheap plaster of a poor domicile ennobled by light: yes, petty, if you like. But unless we care about such things, French things, domesticity, dancing, landscape -- unless we care far more whole heartedly than we did in the last interval of peace -- we shall never maintain the tedious vigilance and take the great trouble necessary to prevent war again, and again and again. Let every author on earth write an All Quiet on the Western Front: still it will not suffice, unless we all warmly feel that our ways, pleasures and sentiments and arts, are worth whatever it may cost to preserve them.

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