Fiction
Restless House. By Emile Zola. With an introduction by Angus Wilson. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 12s. 6d.) Modern Greek Folktales. Chosen and translated by R. M. Dawkins. (Oxford University Press. 50s.) Modern Greek Folktales. Chosen and translated by R. M. Dawkins. (Oxford University Press. 50s.) IN a postscript to his latest mildly horrifying love-story, M. Mauriac defends himself against those more ardent Catholics who would have him subordinate his talent to his religion by showing " the victory of Grace " in a final chapter which remains unwritten. The situation is not new to M. Mauriac ; in a preface, to Trois Recits, written a quarter of a century ago, he regrets that " the finest story in this collection " (which he might have written on Pascal's theme of humiliation transforming itself into inspiration) " is a fourth, which the author has not written, which he has not yet acquired the merit to write." And this slight implication that the cause of his unsatisfactory performance in " taking off " from the sordid realities of the world is due not to some intentional plan of campaign, but to his own shortcoming, breaks through in The Loved and the Unloved as an open statement. It would, he says, be " sheer hypocrisy " to claim that the exposure in fiction of the darker side of life contributes anything significant to the understand- ing of mankind. "• Living persons are never like the characters of fiction. The people presented in novels or on the stage are a race apart." The most that can be claimed for them is that they " give us a great deal of information about the author." So that, if the world presented in the collected edition of his works is increasingly " denuded of Grace," we have, M. Mauriac concludes, only his own vision to blame for it.
Humility of this perceptive kind seems to be the distinguishing mark of those novelists who have been brought by their own tech- nique to recognise that the process of creation is little more than a devious exploration of themselves. It is not that M. Mauriac has ever shown signs of developing the obviously subjective approach of a Virginia Woolf; though he has now so marked a habit of conden- sation that we are occasionally reminded of a child with such a vivi4 experience to recount that he skips some of the intervening links whose importance, to us who have not shared the experience, he underrates. In The Loved and the Unloved, as in so many earlier novels, it is rather M. Mauriac's powerful and intimate certainty as he moves his characters, both inwardly and outwardly, which reveals them as pure creations of his mind. The scenery, the " half dead provincial town " of Dorthe near Bordeaux, makes a suffocating framework. The passion of the strong-willed woman (" There is nothing that cannot be achieved, even in love—so-she thought—by sheer will-power ") seems to operate unchallengeably as she descends on her victim, the young boy who escapes from her into religion. Even the '' normal " love affair of the boy's friend, which develops side by side, is more coherent if not larger than life. The Loved and the Unloved is not a great novel and certainly not an attractive one, but it is the work of a self-conscious artist of the front rank.
Emile Zola is perhaps the foremost of those other novelists who, in contrast to M. Mauriac, have believed not only that they were writing documentary reports about external reality, but in dwelling on the most sordid aspects of that reality were performing a disinter- ested public service. For Zola the novel was une experience scien- tifique, une histoire naturelle, which, he thought, had little or nothing to do with the deepest preoccupations of his own mind, but indicated to society by scientific means the steps it must take to heal itself. And English society, for instance, accepting 'this astonishing claim at its face value, took steps to limit the sale of this admirable trans- lation of Pot-Bouille (now re-issued by Messrs. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, but originally made in the 'nineties by Percy Pinkerton) to a circulation of three hundred copies.
It is, of course, still possible to see how Zola and his nineteenth- century public brought themselves mutually to accept his claim to be reporting " real life." His whole technical approach was imbued with the illusion. - Unable to enter the mind of a character alone and at rest, he developed a genius for handling large numbers of characters and interlocking plots. More like a newspaper than the novel as it had previously existed, his canvas included half- understood gleanings from contemporary science and medicine. Restless House is no exception. A man's face bears " the traces of disordered blood, the result of secret excesses " ; a woman suffers from hysteria according to the diagnosis of an almost mediaeval psychiatry ; a girl's attitude to sex is distorted by reading novelettes. But above and around these little touches, which once added plausi- bility and now fatally destroy the " naturalist " illusion, is a whole framework of abandoned assumptions about character : that it is determined round about adolescence by a system of snobbery and class distinctions, and that predicatable results, often sexual in nature, deeply mark ten out of ten characters subjected to the experience.
Nothing could speak more loudly for Zola's genius than that we recognise it today when its distortions and pathetic claims to objec- tivity have been exposed for what they are. In a neat and well- informed preface by Mr. Angus Wilson, I missed a more radical approach to this problem of Zola's make-up, his denial that his own peculiar vision was involved, his insistence that the world was black, and by its own deplorable choice. M. Jean-Jacques Gautier, a French dramatic critic, sets himself in The Bridge of Asses 'a task which has proved a pons asinorum for more experienced novelists. His hero is a brilliant playwright who trips and falls headlong in his encounter with the farouche and unattractive heroine. But M. Gautier never succeeds in convincing us of his playwright's brilliance or humanity. As the combined presses of Yale and Oxford University issue the collected works of Gertrude Stein, there is not very much to add to our more fragmentary impressions as they first appeared. Mrs. Reynolds, a full-length novel, is now bound together with five shorter examples. " It is a question," says Mr. Lloyd Frankenberg in the introduction, " how much each reader can tolerate of this endless- ness." He reassures us that "when one reads judiciously, the boredom tends to disappear.like the taste of resin in Greek wine." My disappointment in reading Modern Greek Folktales, admirably translated and learnedly introduced by the editor of Forty-five Stories, was that on the whole there was surprisingly little taste of retsina.• Not only is there tittle clear connection between the folk- tales of ancient and modern Greece ; the contact with other modern European folk-literatures appears to have been so close that one
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