Books and Writers
Dore, Dina
Books and Writers The Incoherence of France By Dina Dore SILMNCt OF THESEA. By Vtrcert. MaemUlan. 11.00. IF the merit of a work of art is to be judged by the degree to which ita author iiicceeda...
...Connolly's translation of The Silence of the Sea which has appeared recently is almost too good, for it conceals all the mistakes of the German officer...
...Some persons thJnk that its dominant tone is collaborationist...
...If h* is a good, sentimental, cultured man who was led into war against his will, why is he made a victim of the silences...
...But the reason for dismissing this argument is the same as that for ranking the hook •¦ mediocre...
...This kind cf totalitarian liberalism seems to me bolli unthinking and downright dangerous...
...But facility of technique and style cannot obscure the fundamental disunity and inconsistency, cannot camouflage the glaring lack of convincingness which is the book's great weakness...
...I IKE so many "independent observers" who are self-consciously critical, I expected a short book on America at war to be a sterile re-hash of news reports embellished with statistics...
...The story is well-written, in a direct, simple style, which would achiev* a dramatic intensity if the meaning of the book were clear...
...AM ef the articles are brief, and the •aes that try for complete coverage are hesssarlly obvious snd superficial...
...He does not always convey the abruptness of the sentences, and sometimes ties with relative pronouns, clauses which should remain separated, to be true to the French text...
...further, he also wins over the stubborn young lady who breaks down at the end and bids him "adieu," a startling reversal of her previous behavior...
...ANYONE who wants to know what is going on in Argentina, or whether there was any truth in Senator Butler's charges of Pan American boondoggling, will not find the answers in Miss Prewett's book...
...She has written a long, dull, and completely uncritical history of the growth of Pan Americanism, interim-led with clarion demands that the United States awake from its "Rip Vsn Winkle oblivion to world realities" and "take the hurdles to world leadership...
...The whole situation is reduced to the hue of Beauty and the Beast, as if war and invasion had been a result of fundamental differences between.the French and German peoples: one refined, poetic, subtle...
...Tb* article on the family, by Ernest W. Burgess, is also rather obvious, but ¦I subject matter is less common-place, * that his competent and precise formulation may be somewhat more aecu-Ute than the reader's...
...Five of the articles which attempt a complete discussion of some general subject—population, the urban community, tana communities, the citizen, Japanese-Aatericans—are not particularly useful...
...The article by W. Lloyd Warner on the American town has little to say about the American town, but it offers a very interesting and significant discussion of Memorial Day ceremonies as a modern cult of the dead functioning to contribute some unity to our society—to me a new and entirely plausible interpretation of the role of ceremony in our society...
...There has been a good deal of control tersy about the book, especially since its Knglish translation...
...Th» book is a collection of lectures given kt 9w University of Chicago in 1942 by vleren sociologists on eleven different •spsets of society in time of wsr...
...the vague sentimentalism and insinuating propaganda in which the story is steeped...
...S. P. Dut-ton «t Co...
...Three interesting, competent, and suggestive articles out of eleven may not be worth the price of the book, but any book that adds anything seems to be unusual...
...The author's presentation of a humanitarian or attractive German figure does sot necessarily imply the author's egree-ssas) with the principles of fascism (in fart, it might seem to imply his disagreement...
...Edwin H. Sutherland's article on war and crime presents an interpretation which few readers will find entirely new, but his formulation is careful, precise and plausible, and will provide many with a better understanding of the problem...
...Bryn Mawr College...
...in a discussion of morale, maintains that Allied military victories are not necessarily an indication of high morale, and that the basis of our national morale is fear of defeat rather than hope for a better world...
...If the German officer is a symbol of the oppressor, should he not be possessed of the characteristic qualities of the oppressor...
...Not the South American Way ly KAJHlMIHt MODflL THE AMERICAS ASD TOMORROW...
...the total absence of any discussion of politic*), economic or social issues...
...A shrill insistence that everything is for the best in the best of all possible Pan American worlds will not silence Senatorial skeptics nor satisfy the reasonable doubts of intelligent citizens, U. S. at War ly STEPHEN L4NC4STf ft AMERICAN SOCIETY IN WARTIME, Edited by William F. Ogburn, Vniver-riff of Chicago Prett, $2.50...
...3.00...
...2H page...
...By Virginia Prtwttt...
...the other blunt, brutal, powerful The German officer's love for France manifests itself in a sentimental flow of grandiloquent, ill-defined words, as for example in his comparison of the "inhuman" nature of the German ideology with the "human" character of that of France...
...There are apparent reasons to support this statement: the character of the German, obviously intended U> awaken our sympathy...
...But ¦saw of the articles in American Society *f Wartime added to my understanding...
...Herbert Blumer...
...How-cm, these reasons for labelling the book collaborationist ca.i bi dismissed...
...Steinbeck, in The Moon It Down, presented a situation similar to that of The Silence of the Sea and succeeded in creating powerful, convincing characters of German officers and a powerful, convincing situation...
...The Silence of the Sea is an attempt to symbolize the failure of France and Germany to "marry" and become allies in a constructive union...
...IF the merit of a work of art is to be judged by the degree to which ita author iiicceeda in expressing a truth or a true aspect of life, "The Silence of the Sea," by a French writer who hides under the pseudonym of Vercors onnot rank high in the scale of art...
...The author has weakened the ring ot authenticity of Frenchness, so to speak, in attempting to reproduce realistically the bad French of the German^ officer...
...If writers would not break into print until they had something to say besides bigger and better re-hashes of old stuff, the time saved might be used to think up something worth saying...
...Miss Prewett's attitude, however, is that because the policy is so fundamentally sound, it must not be questioned in any of its less than successful details...
...but the symbolism does not carry its point If the author intended his work to be symbolic, the characters should have been more representative of the ideas for which they stand...
...If The Silmre of the Sea is not intended to be symbolic, if the characters do not stand mainly for ideas', the author has not even written a convincing short story, for the individuals described are made of cardboard, and the situation is false...
...A* the story is excessively stylised, the character* stylized into woodenness, it is inconsistent to introduce this poor attempt at realism, thus destroying style and unity...
...Neither articje is long enough or profound enough to reach any original conclusions, but both are suggestive if you are easily stimulated to look for new implications or reexamine old ones...
...The author creates the atmosphere of the story with a skilled hand, and is adept in adding touches vivid and poetic in their precision of detail: the sound of rain on the pavement around the house, the ringing footsteps of the officer, the silk scarf of the young woman, with hands drawn by Jean Cocteau, the officer's resemblance to Jouvet...
...The short sentences, being too short and-inelastic, sometimes defeat their purpose (the tension must be released in order to mount...
...If the silence of an old man in France is the symbol of resistance, why is he so weak a character, why doesn't he ever show the reasons of his resistance...
...Not only does he ignore what the Germans are doing in France, but he ignores what fascism is in Germany...
...Kut this does not mean that there is not still plenty of room for improvement...
...The philosophy of The Good Neighbor has, as Miss Piewett points out, been responsible for better relations between the United States and the Latin Amei-ican states than have ever before existed...
...The officer appears to be afflicted with that disease which Arthur Koestler called "French Flu " He gasps in fatuous wonder over the great names of French literary history, enumerating abundantly the hallowed names of France, and suggesting that when one thinks of F.ngland the only great name which springs to mind is that ot Shakespeare The author might object to this criticism on the grounds that the words of the German officer are not his, the author's, but the young officer is clearly presented as a likeable character who actually wins the heart of the old man so that the Frenchman is forced to fight against his sympathy for the oppressor...
...There is nowhere any suggestion that anything is wrong with our Latin American relations, no hint of the divergence of Britiah and U. S. intereiU in that field, no attempt to appraise the effects of lease-lend armaments and enormous war contracts on the economic and political strutures of the various countries...
...Otherwise, it is a good, faithful i end it ion of the story...
...Some *f them are well written, but their sta-°stits and interpretations sdd little to tse picture which one can get from the sail, newspapers...
...The two articles on racial ideologies, MJ social science and the war, by Robert % Park and Samuel Stouffer respective-While not making any startling revelations, discuss material which is not completely obvious...
Vol. 27 • April 1944 • No. 14
