Stalemate
HENRY TUBE
Count d'Orgel Raymond Radiguet translated by Violet Schiff (Calder and Boyars 30s) Raymond Radiguet died in 1923 at the age of twenty, leaving two faultless novels to a world which had not had time even to reject, let alone accept him. Calder and Boyars did us the signal service, last spring, of publishing an English translation of the first, seventeen year old, novel, Le Diable au corps. They have now republished Violet Schiff's translation of Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel, first published in 1952 by the Harvill Press.
The translation includes Jean Cocteau's suc- cinctly sonorous preface in which he dubs Le Diable au corps 'a masterpiece of promise' and Le Bal dii Comte d'Orgel 'the promise fulfilled,' and goes on to say: 'One is frightened by a child of twenty who publishes a book that cannot be written at that age. The dead of yesterday are eternal. The author of Le Bal was the ageless writer of a dateless book.' There is nothing inflated about this descrip- tion. It exactly conveys the peculiarly inevit- able quality of a work of art which, like certain pieces by Bach, seems to be entirely familiar the first time one encounters it.
The story is simple: Count d'Orgel, a like- able if shallow member of high society, a quintessential 'gentleman,' is happily married to an unimpeachably chaste lady of equally aristocratic origins. They become close friends with a boy of twenty, who falls in love with the Countess, as she with him. The style ía matter-of-fact, even jerky, and the book is short
What, then, is so remarkable about it? The key, surely, is in one of Radiguet's own notes, discovered after his death by Cocteau: 'A chaste love story as shocking as the least chaste.' We are given here, as it were, the counter to Les Liaisons dangereuses; instead of observing the willed operation of seduction, we observe the spontaneous mechanism of unwilling pas, sion; instead of participating in the childish diversions of spoiled adults, we follow the adult experience of unspoiled children, for the Countess, too, is emotionally a child at the time love begins to work on her. In Radiguers words: 'Mahaut was the kind of woman who cannot make of anxiety her daily bread. Per- haps the chief reason her ancestors had bees virtuous was their fear that love would deprive them of peace.'
It is no doubt shocking to see a marriage destroyed by deliberate corrupters, but how much more so to see it destroyed by incorrup- tion. Radiguet does not attempt to enter deeply into his characters, rather he sketches with a hard classical stroke the convincing outline of his two innocents and sets them against the morally shadowed 'adult world' to which the rest of his characters belong. And now where does the truth lie? With the decent Count in the decent bonds of conventionally 'correct' marriage, or . . . where? There is surely no relationship in which these chaste lovers can retain their innocence. And if they lose their innocence they lose themselves and each other. The book ends without a resolution, seeming to endorse that frighteningly truthful rematt of the corrupted wife in Radiguers earlier
novel: 'My duty is not what you think it is. It is not that I mustn't lie to my husband, but that I mustn't lie to you.' Yet at the same time it does not endorse it, for this wife is not corrupted, or if she is then duty has lost its meaning and there is no other meaning in her vocabulary.
Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel is not perhaps a long enough book to be suitable for a desert island, but it is one of those books one should be sure to have read before being cast away.
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