Fiction
LOUIS ARAGON, well known in this country as a poet and for his work in the French Resistance movement, is only very recently being presented to us in what is apparently in France held to be his most distinguished role, that of prose-writer, novelist. This reviewer, never having read any of his novels in French, was last year con- siderably disappointed by the English version of his Aurelien, which was a long, elaborate exercise in the later Flaubertian manner, but unluckily empty of the Flaubertian power to found the small and particular deep in the universal, its source. Passengers of Destiny, however, is a very much better novel. I do not know in what order they were written, but on internal evidence I would take it to be the earlier of the two books ; nevertheless, it searches much more earnestly into society ; it is more pitiless and wears fewer of the
scars of sentimentality. Yet, for one grave defect which seemed to me to run through about three-quarters of the long work, it is not possible to agree with the " bIttrb " that it is a masterpiece, though indeed it contains many signs and passages of greatness.
To begin with one minor criticism: the work suffers in its trans- lation, which is awkward throughout and in one or two places un- fortunately comic ; and the English title is inane. In French, Les Voyageurs de l'Imperiale points the novel's best part, its period portrayal and social commentary ; but what are we all but passengers of destiny? The phrase is vapourish, and suggests a formless senti- mentality. Since trouble was taken to provide the book with a very accurately suggestive and pleasing wrapper, by Mr. Kenneth Rowntree, more thought might surely have been given to precision in the title?
The novel is very long—four hundred and sixty-six well-filled pages ; and it is in the manner of the French nineteenth century, 'its author inheriting this time more from Balzac than from Flaubert— the former master suiting his spirit the better. It opens with a scene in the Exposition de Paris ot 1889 and it closes 'on the battlefields of 1914-18; begins untidily and fidgetingly, in my opinion, and closes in a great tide of power and tragedy ;- for the last third Of This book, though it gathers up and holds to all that went before, transcends the whole, I think being steadily ironic at last as well as profoundly moving. Had M. think; in terms of realism in balancing his young and middle-aged Pierre Mercadier against the pitiful and superbly presented old man in decay and death, then indeed this book would have been great beyond qualification ; but the major defect, of which I spoke above, lies in the fussy non-reality, the unfelt and overstated presentation of a central character who only comes to life in the deep shadow of his death. Pierre Mercadier is a professor of history in provincial lyeees ; his wife, Paulette—a most unsatisfactorily written character—is a member of the landed gentry class ; they have three children, one of whom dies early in the story ; they have friends, relatives an environment which • shifts between Paris and the provinces ; and they and their group carry us through the general history of the France of their lifetimes. That is the broader story ; its vast background is very well done in cool realism ; and it is shaped in a pattern of thrusts and anti-climaxes which give it vitality ; also it is packed with a great variety of minor characters, all excellently done. But the inner story is of the mind and soul of Pierre, egoist-, cynic, self-searcher, and set up to represent the man of his day and the question of that man's relation to society.
That, in the opinion of this reviewer, he is non-representative, that none of his actions, negations or reflections is per- suasive, that his flight from himself remains unimportant and that the aphorisms and musings in which he seeks to justify or at least examine himself are uniformly shallow and shabby is the great flaw across the face of this ambitious and often very noble book. But it is magnificently worth reading ; and M. Aragon has created in it whole groups of brilliantly living characters ; all the children, par- ticularly Pierre's son, Pascal ; the uncle de Sainteville, the superb Manescu sisters, and, at the end, the sentimental and finally insane old brothel-keeper, Dora Tavernier. He shows unusual power, too, in his selective accuracy with material things ; clothes, rooms, physical characteristics are caught precisely and used to give maximum value. In all of these important points he shows himself a novelist of stature, one who can create a whole society with luminous ease ; more's the pity, therefore, that the philosophy which is set to reflect that scene is insufficient and even irrelevant ; neither cynical enough nor admitting a gleam of nobility.
I have left myself with hardly enough space in which to commend a delicious and original first novel from America—called The Bitter Box, by Eleanor Clark. 13ut this neat, ironic fantasy of a sudden houleversement in the soul of a bank teller and its curious and worrying consequences is written with allied grace of spirit and of phrase. It deserves much success and promises brilliantly for its author. Miss Clark writes with excellent neat drive, holding on to her close-packed theme like a terrier, and refusing to let the reader drop a line. She is witty and sympathetic, and brings freshness and astringency to a story which might well have gone to pieces in the hands of a beginner.
Where Freedom Perished is hardly a novel at all, and in its long dialogues at least shows no novelistic talent ' • but it is a noble, moving record of life in Germany under the Nazis for those who would not submit to Nazi -terrorism. The young -author, Hilda Monte' was killed in 1945 while frying to take a last message over the Swiss frontier. This book modestly and nobly mirrors the courage and
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