The New Leader Literary Section
The New Leader Literary Section The Nightmare and the Dream By MELVIN J LASKY WAR DIARY. By /M« Malmquau. Doubled** Dora*, ttSQ. IP^M not sure that the truth in literature will always help 'make...
...On the doorsteps friends had stood meeting the felling thousands with the suggestion of s welcome, some food, some soap and water, a hinted loving hopeful goodbye...
...And tor myself I think of it as an Honest *nd True book (and are there more than « dosen on that shelf...
...The women wrung their hands, or ran them over their faces like people demented...
...A will to break, to smash to bits, anybody, anything, no matter who or what...
...I feel that I am becoming gangster material...
...Sometimes he managed a fleeting detachment by melodramatiting hia loneliness: "I spy upon them in their words, their attitudea, their reaction...
...One does not, of course, go through transports of new illumination on the batin-field, or parade-ground, or in the latrine...
...A rebirth ol love tempered his nihilism, and transcended the meanness of the tragedy...
...Through all the confessional fury there is always the light and power of a sensitive intelligence...
...We are not finding, however, that these' themes are being especially reexploited, and it would not be accurate taay that is because we are trying to locate and explore peculiar themes...
...A tenacious lust, which I nurse, which I would like to be sble to make a part of me...
...And hobbling away from a strafed crossroad, with burden* of packs and rifles— "And all at once, as if touched by a special grace, I had a deep and crushing sense ef how unutterably ridiculous, how unutterably tragic all this was the broad heavens, the shining sun, the green countryside, the bird ef prey above us blindly spitting death, the abandoned motorcycle with its front wheel turning silently on its hub, our headlong flight toward nothing and nowhere:—and I stood at the crossing of the roads, laden like a burro, with my rifle on my shoulder and my bayonet at my side, a sorry wight in the midst of the great irresponsibility of things...
...the ugliness and mediocrity, men endlessly exchanging obscenities and never for a moment feeling the need for solitude...
...snd a sort of double-tongued indulgence which I hold in horror...
...Andre Gide found . H "aching, poignant, frightening...
...There remain the "embarrassing" words that we ought not bear to hear (although the cheating phrases today are more devious, the deceit is subtler...
...And that, perhaps, is why the brief, fractional report of Jean Malaquais' War Diary — a scrambled Rjpsl notebook, its entries made in barracks yards (smelling of manure and ketgrease) and in the rain (leaves "all Warned, all swollen with misery")—constitutes the first original creative document of the second World War, I It* reception by the various reviewers has been for me rather disturbing...
...And it is through that survival and that growth in stature and spirit that hope lies...
...I am not sure, either, that what constituted a genuine emancipation for one generation may not obscure and even disfigure the real conditions of freedom for the next...
...In the beginning he had written— "Everything is crumbling in my brain, everything is raveling oat For me something is beginning which will nullify the psst, and the present, and all the plans for the future which I may have cherished...
...He bore his conscription •Ike a cross, and with his trial came.pain and misery and hate, but also love and understanding...
...There is no mystic sense ef the comradeship of khaki, or olivedrab, or denim-blue...
...He brought back more, in a *sy, and leas...
...Here are "the violent sore throat...
...I am getting hard...
...I would be happy in a wood, lying in ambush behind a parapet of corpses, with a machine gun in my hands...
...In spite of all I say," one anguished entry reads, "they are my klnl And how I suffer for them I. , ." Through all of the nightmare, he was not blinded to the people "who stood at the doors of their homes and wept...
...Here is the boredom, men tired of doing nothing...
...For the novelist* and journalists, bow turning out their mindless, soulless works directly on the keys of the Mao type machine, neither tradition nor truth (nor seriousness) in literature are eery engaging...
...With some old fanners near aa old Lorraine barn, "a great kindness cornea ever me from them and for them...
...It must be a sort of fulfillment to fall beneath a hail of bullets...
...There is still "Pity" in the tragedy, and "vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues...
...Here is the captain-chaplain, "wearing a amile full of benevolence and compassion, one of those smiles which are cus-tomary with ecclesiastics, sn overbland smile, so manifestly professional...
...yet it is that quality of radical • honesty, the strength of the imaginative mind and spirit unwilling to be trapped or corrupted, which provides ¦rkat little real liberation available in our world today...
...For all his revulsion, opposition, disillusionment, Jean Malaquais grew with his suffering...
...A renewal of the heart resisted demoralisation...
...In turn he ^ noted that he would bring back only "« boundless fatigue, a disguat without bounds...
...Think of it: Malaquais, it ia announced, "is somehow a little remote from it all...
...Inappropriate" for whom, "inadequate" for what...
...That business calls for a less perceptive heart, a less critical eye...
...e e "A ReMrfft ef Lave" DUT there is still something more sigmftcant and compelling in this conscript'* chronicle, and I was moved tc recall a poet's line* of many years ago: In the de*«rt* of the heart Let the healing fountain Itart, In the prioon of hit days Teach, the free man how to prats...
...Here, too, is that weird new military jargon, borrowed from the imperaonalised vocabulary of High Industry ("antipersonnel mines," "ration breakdown," "current phase orientation," etc.}: M. was evacuated to a depot for the dieabled, and he comments, "charming phrase...
...V Some of his past waa nullified...
...A real lust for murder grips me, holds me, and does not let go of me...
...On the Strasbourg road, infiltrating the Nasi lines, "There is something more than a mere demonstration of solidarity in this scene of whole populations standing by the road with all the contents of their cupboard in their arms...
...From their look and their gestures and the things that they say I feel the soul of brotherhood ascending, and it makes my heart beat faster...
...But the best was not, gotten of him...
...But for the first time one has earned the right to ssy it...
...The "lies" goon...
...Every strategy for individual security has to be exploited— evasion, compromise, adaptation, dissimulation, "great common self-effacement...
...He grew stronger...
...Equally charming, I suspect is this writer's own tag—catualty replacement...
...It i* only for now that we cannot see the dream for the nightmare...
...Here ia "yesterday" aa a "myth-haloed past," and the touching nostaglia of an intellectual: "Books, whatever they are—I mean the mere look and feel of them— move me ridiculously...
...Now I don't believe there era any civilian and enlisted verities— as if truth, too, were classified by selective service...
...F. W. Dupee compared it rather cooly with Cummings' Snormout Room, with which it has almost nothing in common...
...Malaquais' recording of all this has passion* and desperation, but that Should warrant only small discount, for not all * truth requires objectivity...
...The young men of my own literary generation could conveniently, and honestly too, find refuge in the shadows of Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos: the tradition has warmth, the style is safe, the sense of an unbroken past suggests a sustaining community...
...The tragedy Is still to play itself out ("The world— their world—is rolling slowly toward the abys...
...He survived...
...f__- »— .j —---————----———:-— Httl* relevance to our current literary actuation...
...My own uncertainty, and in fact the _j___hi—i__„r.i— v...
...Conscription Like • Cress" *|JRlN(l back a lovely symphony to us," someone wrote to Malaquais when he *ent into the French army...
...Kay Boyle's remarks were the very model of that back-page Philistinism the rimes Peek Review practices so artlessly...
...Suddenly I am on the verge of tears...
...Isaac Rosenfeld (in The Now Republic) found Malaquais' commentary "Inappropriate and inadequate," and developed hi* critique in that strange new rhetoric which disguises Its hollowness and immsturity with earnest verbalisations about "the knowledge of what life ia...
...It is hardly "art," or •van a finished work...
...Somehow every detail is here, details which curiously enough have been standardised for every army and every conscript by the international of war...
...If nothing in his eyes seemed to make for a happy adjustment to the men (or to France, Europe, modern society), yet be waa not ca-uprht completely in the circle of despair and hysteria...
...suffered the penalty for having lived in society...
...What will ever become of his sketch of Kafka, his work on Gide...
...I sm drswn at once to a man or woman carrying a book under hia or her arm...
...Yet certain things •see not be said, dare not be said, until ehe has "been in," shared the burden...
...Edmund Wilson was impressed only by the moat conventional passage (the dramatic flight in the spring of 1940 of a crumbling national army), and thought the rest "little more than an exasperated record of the dreariness of army life . . . often noted before...
...More often he could only confess to his utter personal alienation: "I have never learned to live among men...
...IP^M not sure that the truth in literature will always help 'make men free...
...What one has to ssy would in any case be imaginatively or intellectually familiar...
...And M. reflected—"Today Is a great day of goodness, a greet hoar ef kindness to be inscribed in the golden book of mankind...
...He could even dream (a little uncritically) ef "the recovery of our human greatness...
...Malaquais' War Diary is s slim and formless volume...
...the vast unspeakable exhaustion . . . the rumble of snoring . . . the inking of serial numbers . , . the stupidity, the confusion, snd the grief...
...The people had enough heart, he discovered, to warm him, to warm them all (even at the price of death...
...He learned the "grandeur of loneliness" with the fleeing mob of the French army, waiting for his "personal burst of shrapnel," an actor, no longer a spectator, in the endof-the-world spectacle...
...something which will have the better of not only me but of my whole generation, but also—and how ardently I hope for* this—but also of this accursed system of human relations which exhausts its genius preparing one massacre on top of another...
...H« had been (to use Henry James' conceit) j>o*$e*$ed, and he strove to possess his possession...
Vol. 27 • May 1944 • No. 20
