Introduction

To write about the passing of a close friend, with whom intellectual life and personal affairs have intimately bound one for half of a long lifetime, is necessarily to be involved in private reminiscence. Europeans in World Wars were struck by the New World coming to redress the wrongs of the Old. Now, in a new era of transatlantic reconstruction, the culture of the Old World would perhaps be in a position of reciprocity, helping to redress the simplicities of the American mind. This "European Journal" contains almost all of the articles, mostly in author's quick and rather free translations, which he contributed to Encounter between its founding, under the Anglo-American editorship of Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, and its closure in 1990 after thirty years of author's editorship. In a world of increasing cultural provincialism, a paradoxical side effect of a mindless economic globalization, this remains a worthy ideal; and Francois Bondy was one of its most dazzling figures.