What Did Happen, in Your Opinion?
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING What Did Happen, In Your Opinion? By Stanley Edgar Hyman Jean Cau, a French journalist of 38, was formerly Jean-Paul Sartre's secretary. The Mercy of God (translated by...
...He also killed the only person he loved, a fat effeminate wrestler called "Guitare d'Amour," shooting him through the heart...
...Alex strangled Maridge and cut her wrists with a razor to make it look like suicide...
...This is a literary variant of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle...
...Instead, they return to separate identities, the other three are discovered to be figments of the Doctor's dreams, and they accept him as God...
...it is sweet as honey in the mouth, but bitter in the belly...
...The most elusive of the four men is Match, an intellectual...
...After the contracts are signed, New York bookmakers offer Eugène 35 million francs if Alex will throw the fight...
...Match killed his invalid father in self-defense in a fight, killed his mother by exposing her to sunstroke, and bashed in his stepfather's skull...
...The bribe is indignantly refused, and Alex continues to train, boxing with imaginary sparring partners, then improving his style by a method of Eugene's invention called "autocriticism...
...The four friends drive him to suicide by staring at him silently for 11 days...
...He became a compulsive gambler...
...The four men reconstruct each other's crimes...
...At various times Match says that he is a virgin, says and denies that he has been a priest, says and denies that he is a homosexual...
...his stepfather had his skull cracked when a flowerpot fell on it, or he was murdered by a prowler, "the kind specializing in rich old men...
...In the French literary tradition...
...Alex's passion is physical fitness, and he spends much of his time in the cell naked, trying to get a tan in the shaft of sunlight that comes through the skylight...
...The problem is that these narratives contradict themselves, and that we cannot tell truth from fantasy...
...We have no reason to doubt any of these events, since Match's radio also announces that Eugène came in third in the Tour de France, which we know to have occurred...
...Eugène races in the Tour de France in his dreams, coming in third because the Italians and the Dutch gang up on him...
...The Doctor claims to have strangled several women, perhaps during epileptic fits, and he may have decapitated his wife Helene...
...In the rest of the world, four popes have died in three months, Negroes and whites are at war in the southern United States, Mao Tse-Tung has been hanged in Tokyo (perhaps as "a crime of passion"), and scientists have perfected the grafting of animal heads onto human bodies...
...They merge identities and become one...
...Other prisoners and guards are mentioned, but none is ever seen except the man driven to suicide, a prison barber, and one guard, stupid and malicious, who brings the cell's inmates their necessities...
...He also—or instead —killed his pretty young wife Jeanne, cutting her throat in one version, and kicking her in her pregnant belly until she died in another version...
...If anyone murdered Jeanne, it was the foreman...
...Later Match explains a comparable Theory of Relativity...
...A lady who lives in my house believes that the book should have ended there, and I suspect that she is right...
...They never leave the cell...
...In the book's climactic action, a new prisoner is put into the cell, against the wishes of its occupants...
...The Mercy of God is the despairing banner of that paradise two centuries later: men, with the death instinct out of control, huddle together guiltily...
...I was reminded of The Brothers Karamazov by Match's speculations about the permissible, of Sologub's The Petty Demon by Eugene's drunken hunt for the foreman under the kitchen table oilcloth, of Barnes' Nightwood by the Doctor's rhetoric (which is not up to its prototype), of West's Miss Lonelyhearts by some of Alex's imagery, and of Through the Looking-Glass by the book's ending...
...You think...
...At various times Alex insists that he was framed for the murder of Guitare, and in fact he denies that he ever killed anyone (Arabs do not count...
...At various times he thinks that he is a horse or a donkey, or says that he does...
...In a superb mad scene of Match's trial, the Doctor plays Match's mother, risen from the dead to testify that Match is innocent of his stepfather's death, and Match plays the Judge, trying to break down her testimony...
...The scene for these garish events is a cell in a French jail, perhaps in France, perhaps in a desert somewhere...
...After Eugène tells the Doctor both that he kicked his wife to death and that she committed suicide, the Doctor says: "That doesn't make sense...
...Then he lived as a pimp on the earnings of a whore named Julienne, called "Maridge" to make her sound English...
...Alex is matched to fight Sugar Ray Robinson for the world championship in Madison Square Garden, and Eugène pretends to train him with runs in the Bois and workouts with a medicine ball...
...The Mercy of God (translated by Richard Howard, Atheneum, 310 pp., $5.00) is Cau's first novel to be published here...
...his mother expired from grief and despair...
...But perhaps Maridge really did commit suicide, and Alex only imagines that he strangled her...
...In a fit of jealousy, he killed his foreman, who was perhaps the lover of Eugene's wife...
...The Mercy of God deals with four men in a prison cell, all apparently sentenced to life imprisonment for murder...
...They have been there for years...
...Most immediately, it is an existentialist allegory of the human condition: Man is "in for life...
...The fourth prisoner, the Doctor, is either mad or pretends to be, and has epileptic fits or fakes them...
...While these confessions and denials weave their shifting patterns of the past, an imaginary life of the present goes on in the cell...
...In France, 19 million people have been arrested, the livestockhas died in a terrible drought, and the production of books is down to 12 a year, seven of them about the "new prison regime...
...Here is Eugene's account of his wife: "Overcompressed, backfiring, she dragged him from one shopwindow to the next, compared prices as fast as a cash register, took in the surrounding female society with a series of stares that would disintegrate uranium, and chattered constantly...
...Beyond its existentialist message, The Mercy of God seems to embody some of the concepts of modern physics...
...The prisoners fill other days by confessing their tiny faults ("I hold grudges," "I tend to tell lies," "I'm a glutton"), or reciting a petition that the Doctor has composed against the heat, which he believes to be caused by malevolent human agency...
...Match gambles at baccarat and is wiped out...
...An ugly man with beautiful hands, he grew up unloved by his parents, solitary and tormented...
...The Mercy of God is an extraordinarily interesting novel, and I think that it will be talked about the way Waiting for Godot was...
...The Mercy of God is variously indebted to Simenon, Genet, Beckett, Sartre's No Exit, and Robbe-Grillet's film script Last Year at Marienbad...
...Over a period of several months, we see their life in the cell and we get flashbacks to their earlier lives and crimes, partially narrated in the first person by the characters...
...His father died a natural death...
...Howard's translation is readable and racy, and seems transparent...
...In his childhood, he murdered his brother by pushing him into a crevasse on a mountain climbing trip...
...These characters suffer from what Raymond Queneau calls ontalgie, the pain of being...
...This victory regenerates them morally, so that they attain to gentleness and perfect understanding...
...It won the Prix Goncourt in 1961, and has sold more than 200,000 copies in France...
...At other times he insists that he never killed anyone...
...Cau is sometimes quite funny...
...Eugène found the foreman dead, and tried to scare Jeanne off other lovers by pretending to have murdered this one...
...At other times Cau is eloquent and moving, as in a glimpse of the Doctor: "Kneeling at Helène's feet, he rested his old child's head in the hollow of her thighs...
...The principal fantasy activity of the four is reenacting their former lives...
...Alex, prompted by Match, plays Helene in a quarrel with the Doctor...
...Having been simultaneously slow and advanced as a child, he was never on the same "time" that others were on, including his cellmates in their periods of happiness...
...Eugène then explains that he wouldn't have killed his pregnant wife because "I love kids" —and the next page states "Eugène didn't like kids...
...In other moods he denies that Helene is dead and claims that he only intends to kill her...
...What, finally, does it all mean...
...Alex is a boxer who had trouble getting fights after he killed an Arab in the ring...
...Crusoe is the optimistic banner of the rising middle class: with industry and ingenuity, man can build a paradise...
...then Match plays priest and urges the Doctor to confess...
...Alternatively, Eugène denies that he killed either...
...The Doctor cannot find out whether Eugène did or did not commit murder, because his efforts to find out alter Eugene's ideas on the subject, which are the only reality at present...
...Gently, she caressed that poor head full of emptiness and madness and cried...
...France as a "prison regime" is a microcosm of the world...
...Eugène killed him in a horrible fashion, cutting him in half with a steel beam dropped from the crane, and then went home and asked for lamb chops for dinner...
...The Doctor thinks that he is to fight Sugar Ray, and the others claim each other's crimes and memories...
...Eugène answers, "Well, what did happen, in your opinion...
...Eugène is a crane operator and heavy drinker, who dreams of being a champion bicycle rider...
...Jean Cau has written a novel like the little book in Revelation...
...finally the Doctor harangues Eugène as Helene and almost strangles him...
...The influences on Cau are numerous...
...to console himself, he goes out of training and has dream affairs with 10 different women...
...Kafka and Pirandello pervade the book...
...News of the outside world is announced periodically by Match, who has an imaginary radio...
...he says that his brother slipped into the crevasse when the Doctor was nowhere near, and in fact that he never had a brother...
...More than anything else, The Mercy of God is an answer to Robinson Crusoe, which the Doctor describes as "the most terrifying story in the world...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 11
