Of the Disappointed Man

...The closest parallel relationship that comes to mind is—oddly—the one that exists between Huck Finn and Jim on their raft in the Mississippi...

...And this much irony is an acceptable version of life, for we all know that idealists often pay for their irreproachable dreams in coin of another currency altogether, that unpleasant and indeed wicked people can contribute to noble enterprises, that good will is taken advantage of...

...Similarly, and possibly because they best convey the remarkable emotional quality of this love, the idyllic scenes on the canal barge that takes Anna and Jongman out of Holland to France are far and away the most convincing scenes in the book, and are, moreover, written with a splendid felicity...

...The victim rescued by Jongman is Anna Held, a Jewess, tuberculous, 21 years old and so terribly mutilated by the pseudo-scientific sadism of a Nazi medical-experimentation camp that—with Auschwitz humor—she finds her proposed destiny in prostitution merely amusing...

...Jongman has lost his job, his pension, his family, and has also compromised his future as the price of Anna’s passage...

...sharing this obsession becomes, for Jongman, the means to a recovery of his self-respect...

...everything is better explained than the inspector himself, and as the viewpoint in the novel is his, many uneasy moments are inevitable...

...Jongman is revolted by the eccentric, God-quarrelling Dutchman in Tangier who provides Anna’s passage, for he is a large-scale smuggler who deals in guns and any other contraband, including illegal Jewish immigrants, and who provides for his cargoes of Jews—at exorbitant rates—accommodations not materially better than those supplied by the Nazis in boxcars...

...But nothing is as straightforward as it seems...

...A British Foreign Office agent, deeply touched by Anna’s plight, cooperates to the extent of helping her past the British patrols, but he is deceived after all, and surely it is ironical, in a way, that the presence of a pathetic, dying girl should be used as a cover for an illegal shipment of arms...

...For that matter, why was he so naive as to ask sympathy and assistance from a wife whose nature he knew thoroughly, and why was he transformed without a moment’s doubt or struggle from a “cowardly failure” to a man capable of, even insistent upon, gambling away his minimal, middle-aged security...

...But even a disappointed man must elicit conviction, and de Hartog has given us such an exceedingly underwritten hero that conviction is hard to come by, much as we want it—and it is a tribute to de Hartog that in fact we do want it, that through 300 pages, we honestly long to know more about this over-modestly presented character and are honestly disappointed that affectionate curiosity comes to nothing...

...Such an idealist as Jongman cannot conceivably believe that gun-running, in however justifiable a cause, is a less violent activity than offering a witness to a trial intended, even more justifiably, to punish the guilty, and indeed he does not believe so: another irony, therefore, as we become aware that Jongman’s hard-won self-respect is to be sacrificed once more...

...This apparently blunt account is really a tangled tale of multiple, puzzling ironies...

...irony rests firmly upon a fundamental confusion...

...previously, however, he has persuaded Anna to refuse the offer made by the Jewish immigration committee in Tangier to send her to America for treatment, especially so that she may offer her mutilated body as evidence for the Nurenberg trials, and this on the specific grounds that she must “break the curse of violence” and go to Palestine as a “message of love...

...But irony, which deals largely with the jokes played by life, must be— like any joke—clear and pointed, and Jan de Hartog’s story is far too often confused...

...None of these reasonable questions is answered...

...The couple succeeds, yes, but the nature of the success is questionable: Anna barely survives the journey and is carried ashore in Palestine only in time to die among her people...

...Jongman is a remarkably consistent loser, whose only win has been to get Anna, barely alive, into the arms of the Haganah, and the tendency of his fate raises questions...

...What is real about this book is the quality of the love that exists between Jongman and Anna, a non-physical, extraordinary, instantly believable emotion, a variety of love not much written about in our literature and almost never this well...

...In the end, Jongman is committed to a future in the smuggling fleet...

...Her sole and obsessive desire is to reach Palestine...

...The initial situation is a routine police operation against a Nazi presently engaged in enticing young Dutch girls to South America and white slavery...

...the inspector (of the Amsterdam police) is Peter Jongman, husband of a domestic fury, father of a foolish and alienated daughter and, at 53, in his own eyes “a failure, a cowardly, henpecked failure...

...Was Jongman unselfish in advising Anna not to go to America, or is he obsessed with the project of bringing her to Palestine as a last, and selfish, means of personal salvation...

...Why, in fact, did he instantly and abruptly adopt her obsession as his own, and what, in the end, does it mean to him...

...The book, neatly plotted along the lines of an adventure story—which it is not—gives a straightforward, blunt account of their flight from Holland to Tangier to Palestine, and it is a flight, not a journey: Jongman’s wife, of whom he has naively enough asked sympathy in his enterprise, broadcasts their illegal intentions and insures for them opposition from every conceivable source...

...Yet Jongman signs on as a skipper in this fleet when that is the price exacted for Anna’s fare...

...Reviewed by Anne Sayre Contributor, “Cosmopolitan,” “Redbook,” “Colorado Review” THE TIME IS 1946, or the uneasy aftermath of war...

...The Inspector is, of course, recognizably a novel about that familiar modern hero, the disappointed man, and Anna is plainly that recommended antidote to disappointment, the object of selfless love...

...It is the intense reality that they convey that carries the book on and makes the conclusion emotionally, if not in the least logically, satisfying...

...Jongman inspires affection, but on the last page of the book, he is as confused a figure as on the first, and the principal question is unanswered: What is the author getting at...

...Nothing, however, is simple about this odd pair...