The Desert of Love, and The Enemy. By Francois Mauriac.
Trans- THE fourth volume of M. Mauriac's work in translation contains two shortish novels with a common theme. It is a theme which lies very close to the heart of his pessimistic philosophy, and which links together a sense of the fatality of sexual passion and a conviction of the Divine will in matters great and small. In Le Desert de l'Amour a schoolboy of seventeen is rebuffed in his attempted conquest ot the woman, the indolent, half-neurotic mistress 01 a rich business- man, for whom he is in some sort a romantic image of innocence, and feeds his humiliation in later years by a life of inconsolable debauchery. In Le Mal (which Mr. Hopkins has translated under the title of The Enemy) another schoolboy, brought up in the odour of Jansenist sanctity, is corrupted by the alluring friend of his widowed mother, and is thereafter condemned, it appears, to the unceasing torment of a sterile desire for grace.
It is difficult—perhaps it is impossible—for the reader who is not a Roman Catholic, and who is not intimately versed in the French literary tradition of Catholicism, to enter with complete confidence into the imaginative preoccupations of this very remarkable novelist. Of the stern justice, the inexorable penetration of M. Mauriac's analysis of human weaknesses there need be no question. Of the poetic sentiment which he brings to every familiar scene in Bordeaux and among the pine forests and wastelands of the surrounding country, to the intellectual austerities of religious devotion, to moments of impassioned Pascalian acceptance—a poetic sentiment which alone, I think, makes his otherwise forbidding vision of life endurable—there need similarly be no argument. But what is the English reader, bred to the saving romanticism of the Protestant and pragmatic mind, to make of M. Mauriac's imaginative obsession with the irremediable sinfulness of man ? These tortures of the flesh, these aridities of the spirit, these renunciations of happiness or hope in favour of the will of God—do they not leave us in the end with the feeling that this is a moralist who, for all his clarity of mind, cannot or will not come down to earth and the common measure of man's nature ?
Le Desert de l'Amour does not represent the best of Mauriac. The adolescent curiosity and confusion of the boy Raymond are real enough, but neither the languorous, demi-semi-poetic Maria Cross nor the saintly Dr. Courreges, the boy's father, who loves her in a despairing agony of silence, carries genuine conviction ; while again and again the ordinary narrative effect, which all through is distorted by a curiously fevered and stiff-jointed style of construc- tion, is further weakened by an incongruous descent into mere senti- mental convention. Le Mal, published in 1935, ten years later, is much better. The familiar erotic situation between Fabicn and the ageing Fanny has a sharp edge of veracity, the portrait of the joyless,
loving and inflexibly pious Mme. Dezaymeries, the boy's mother is in Mauriac's truest and most telling vein, and the poetry and th pessimism alike illuminate the metaphysical argument. Even here, however, there are -.fixings it is hard to swallow ; in particular, the scene in which 1anr4 is thrown at Fabien's head in Venice is quite incredible. But this is a book to read if not to take to one's heart; the depth and integrity of its Catholic philosophy may make up for its parched quality of life. Mr. Hopkins's translation, as in the earlief volumes, reads extremely well.
There is nothing else this week, and there would be little in most other weeks, that could be fitly matched with M. Mauriac. But Guard of Honour, one of two American war novels, should by no means be overlooked. In this very long book Mr. James Gouldi Cozzens describes the events of three days at an air-base in Florida in the late summer of 1943. The method he has adopted is that made fashionable a generation ago by Jules Romains and then styledl unanimiste—though the shade of Henry James also hangs over the narrative in a cloud of involuted psychological explication and in the person of a meditative Jamesian observer. It is the totality ot life on the station that Mr. Cozzens sets out to capture, and he goes about the job by scattering mountains of detail about the organisatidp of the U.S.A.A.F. As a novelist he has very solid merits—an acute feeling for character, dramatic sense, a nice turn of contemplative irony. His youngest general in the American Air Force, the arrogant flying ace who is the general's close friend, the melancholy Jamesian observer who is a judge in civilian life, and the over-intelli- gent and maddeningly self-conscious young W.A.C. officer are all extraordinarily well done. On people and things British Mr. Cozzens is always unkind and sometimes more than a little impertinent.
I wish I could say sincerely good things about The Young Lions, since Mr. Irwin Shaw is as complimentary, all things considered, about us as Mr. Cozzens is the reverse. It is as long a book as the other or langer, is much more of a war novel, and is uniformly and transparently well meant. But it seems to me to be crude and wearisomely conventional both in description and sentiment. There are far too many cheaply titillating sex episodes, the protest against anti-Semitism is pitched in too heroic a key, the actual war scenes— though they improve towards the end of the book—generally attempt a too facile horror, and it is surely mere self-indulgence at this time of day to go on registering a cry of muddled pacifist good will.
Both Troy and the Maypole and Down the Long Slide are dis- appointing. Mr. Winston Clewes is neat, lively, unaffected, yet never leaves the reader in doubt for a moment as to what is coming. M:. Hopkinson ekes out -rather slender resources with some ingenuity, but cannot avoid a too pale and unsubstantial effect.
R. D. CHARQUES.
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