BOOKS OF THE DAY
Courrier Francais
(This is the second of the letters on current French books which the Stendhalian scholar, M. Henri Martineau, is contributing to The Spectator at regular intervals. His first Paris letter appeared in The Spectator for May 9.)
M. PAUL VIALAR has already made his name as a successful novelist.
He is now producing, episodically, one of those long, many-volumed novels fashionable in France which we call roman-fieuves. La mort est un commencement (Domat) is the enigmatic title of his latest book. I am told it will take six volumes to complete it ; the third of these has just appeared. But M. Vialar does succeed in riveting our attention ; we shall not give up until he has published his last page. This large novel is a detailed description of the life of an enfant du siècle. And how moving it is, this account of the existence of one of our own contemporaries—the hopes, the excitements, the experiences common to the majority of French • people today. The book opens tragi- comically—it is like one of those grotesque masks in which the mouth grins while the eyes are filled with tears. This is the Bal des Sauvages in which the hero's few weeks of war in 1940 are described—before he is taken, a prisoner, to Germany. In prison he begins to go back over his childhood memories in the dos des trois maisons. The cycle of his youth ends with a visit to England, and the moment in which he embarks at dawn for the 1914-1918 war, a volunteer at the age of eighteen. This, you feel, is a profoundly human, fascinating and moving piece of work.
We too have had our Ariel—a poet who seemed to prefer to play, to dream, to laugh, to concoct fantasies ; but who could also show the evil forces of destiny at work, families quarrelling, the triumph of death—all without losing a jot of his grace or of his lyricism. Jean Giraudoux died two years ago ; they have just published l'Apollon de Bellac (Grasset), a one-act play of his which nobody knew. The Apollo of Bellac does not, of course, exist in fact. Giraudoux disinterred him from antiquity for our benefit and for his own purposes. The function of the Apollo of Bellac is simply to remind women " that they are here on earth to tell men that they are handsome. And those who are to tell men this the most fre- quently must be themselves the most beautiful. And, anyway, it is exactly those women who do say it." Giraudoux's little play is a mere trifle, a divertissement, but perfectly enchanting at that.
In Le roman d'Aisse (Societe- &editions litteraires francaises) the two brothers Jerome and Jean Tharaud (both of them members of the Academie Francaise) are writing in the role of witnesses as much as of literary historians. Their style is magical. Both of them were once secretaries to Maurice Barris. They remained in the circle of his most intimate friends, and they have already written, both lightly and seriously, of this distinguished literary figure. In their new work certain traits of Barris are especially emphasised, certain hitherto unknown aspects are described. But this time Maurice Barris is not all by himself ; the mobile face of the Comtesse de Noailles forms a pendant to his portrait. The whole story of that long, troubled and tempestuous amitie d'ame, luminous with sincerity, is retold in this little book.
There is no need to remind English readers how interesting a bio- graphy of Marshal Foch must be, but I cannot help drawing attention to the importance of General Weygand's Foch (Flammarion). The author is an experienced writer on military subjects, and the best qualified man in the world to deal with this particular one. We all remember the part which Weygand played at the side of the generalissimo of the Allied armies in the 1914-18 war. During those terrible months he was able to approach Foch at any moment of the day—Foch, that exceptionally gifted being who was then carrying the universe on his shoulders. What better conditions could there be for taking stock of individual character, for seeing Fetch's qualities of leadership, for appreciating his sense of strategy and his gift for sizing men up? General Weygand is himself an eminent soldier. No one is better placed than he to explain the sweep of operations from the Marne to the Battle of France, or to show in which way and against what perpetual odds the unity of command was born. He has not allowed Foth's role at the armistice and during the peace negotiations to overshadow the true story of his stormy relations with Clemenceau. The whole book is lightened by those personal anecdotes which give a biography of this kind depth and life.
Not long ago I happened to write about the numerous, meticulous studies of the life and works of Henri Beyle which have been coming out during the last few years. I said that in my opinion these books heralded an era in which Stendhal's achievement would at last be really and thoroughly assessed. In the Oxford periodical, French Studies, a reviewer (otherwise most indulgent to me) declared that he did not agree. Today my contention receives firm support from M. Maurice Bardeche. In the first place, M. Bardeche has stated that these biographical studies are indispensable to anyone trying to understand Stendhal's work and thought ; and in the second he has now himself produced in Stendhal Romancier (La Table Ronde), just the kind of major work to which I was looking forward. Needless to say, he has not exhausted the Stendhalian domain, but his sane, precise analyses do bring new light to bear on the great novelist—a strong light of originality, an adroit way of posing problems and of solving them. The new conclusions he has reached can be definitely regarded as so much new ground conquered : they quite distinctly add to our knowledge of the author of the Chartreuse de Parme. In a thesis which aroused justifiable attention, M. Maurice Bardeche had previously examined Balzac Romancier ; now, enriched by his own experience of life and by further reflection, he gives us something far more rounded and also more austere—in a word something more alive. He has realised (and he makes us do so too) that the aimless, groping years of Stendhal's youth were not years wasted. When the future author of the Rouge et Noir and of Lucien Leuwen turned from play-writing to the construction of novels, all his earlier experiments were of use to him. He knew his job, he had acquired a deeper knowledge of men ; his theory of the human soul was already developed within him, and the writer who had begun fumblingly could now compose with lightness and ease. These findings confirm everything that was first suggested (by Jean Prevost) about the development of Stendhal.
In the course of his analyses M. Bardeche makes the good point that Stendhal had a contempt for the purely imaginative. He states, and brings up evidence in proof, that the novelist always needed to take some actual situation as a starting-point for his work. He always began with a framework which suited his taste, but which he did not have to think up for himself. Choosing some story of real life, Stendhal excelled in disentangling it, giving it some explanation far more logical, and sometimes even more plausible, than anything that had actually occurred. He hardly invented any part of the basic structure of his stories, but he showed his powers in filling in the details from his teeming imagination. The more unnecessary some real episode might seem, the more cleverly he would unearth its hidden possibilities. M. Bardeche has fully grasped the contradic- tions inherent in 'Stendhal's character—a writer both contem- plative and impulsive, sensual and ethereal, a caustic observer of life, but a dreamer, too. M. Bardeche would not contradict me if I said that, in spite of a few crude phrases in his letters and private papers, Stendhal, more than almost any other novelist, respects the sensibili- ties of his readers, showing a soul at once passionate and shy. Hand in hand with his adoration of women went a charming, fresh love for children. These contradictions of Stendhal's character are all described in M. Earache's book. They give it its true weight and
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