French Contrasts
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING French Contrasts By Raymond Rosenthal Andre Maurois is intelligent, tactful, sensitive. All of these qualities, not so common that they can be scorned, are to be found in his...
...It is, of course, a well-intentioned group-spirit and perhaps Romains was too sanguine, particularly when one thinks of the rapacious group-spirits that have recently ravened Europe...
...but I do blame him for making a minor, ironic Valerian idea do the work that could only be accomplished by a much more sturdy intellectual structure...
...I have not said to myself: I am going to transpose what I have seen into the story of a young girl frightened by misfortune and injustice...
...Romains based his literary work on "the concept of a vast and elemental being, of whom the streets, the cars, the passers-by formed the body, and of whom he, at this privileged moment, could call himself the consciousness...
...Perhaps it is just a matter of talent...
...But for a time, they will enable him to live...
...If the world were lucid, art would not be...
...But, from this perspective, Val?©ry is a nihilist, and he cannot be floated away from the abyss on the flimsy raft which Maurois has lashed together out of odds and ends in his thinking...
...The school of Vnanimism, which was the name Romains gave his discovery, wanted to explore collective sentiments, to show how the individual entered into instinctual communion with the Unanime or group-spirit...
...and since he cannot bear the thought of delivering Val?©ry to the nihilists, he promptly fills the gap with the idea of convention...
...Thus, Val?©ry's thought has followed the natural line of all powerful minds...
...Camus' novels, except for his last, The Fall (a lyrical work which was closer in spirit to the romantic nihilism that he consciously rejected than any of his other books), are well written but schematic...
...I would agree that conventions play an important part in Val?©ry's concept of writing poetry, that they even figure in his thinking about social realities...
...One forgets how original Romains' early novels, such as The Death of a Nobody and The Boys in the Backroom, were, how unique in modern literature was their aspiration toward a synthetic vision of society that brought together the data of sociology and the sensibility found in modern poetry...
...Bernanos wrote this novel as a result of his experiences in Majorca during the Franco reign of terror...
...Above all, Bernanos, who was a radical but certainly not the kind that is sympathetic to a Uberai or socialist...
...They did not understand...
...Maurois' description of his stance between rebellion and acceptance is neat and true...
...It was characteristic of him that, when dealing with the fear of death in his Propos on happiness, he should tell his readers that it was absurd to fear death "since such a thought has no object: we cannot think of ourselves as other than alive...
...A keen practical mind with a mystical bent, Alain knew the value of the body in our emotions, the profession or trade in our thoughts, the groundwork of nature in our art works...
...Nevertheless, his novels are worth re-reading and Maurois has provided a good introduction to them...
...Maurois strolls in after the storms are over, ignores the damage wrought by passion or politics, and after careful labeling, stows away what he regards as worth conserving...
...Maurois is best on writers that have been forgotten or overlooked...
...It is also pleasant to read about Jules Romains after so many years of unmerited neglect...
...Although his essays are crisp and succinct, written in a style notable for its ability to define positions and extract intellectual essences, Monsieur Maurois' attitude is not the sort to produce exciting or revelatory criticism...
...The modern thinker, like Val?©ry," Maurois says, "no longer believes that he can explain the universe, or even that there is an explanation for it...
...He really saw the evil, even wallowed in it, but was saved by his love for the poor...
...I only say that it cannot be a matter of just any rule.'" But art is terribly unfair...
...The Valerian tabula rasa, which swept away philosophy, history, linguistics, politics and religion, leaves an ugly gap Maurois feels...
...I had been struck by the impossibility which poor people have of understanding the frightful games in which their lives are entangled...
...Against what...
...and though the eminence may not suit this modest but greatly gifted writer, so thoroughly French in his rationalistic religion, his radicalism, his equability and his rage, it is nevertheless true that, as Maurois says, the myths of religion, the mysteries of art, and the commonplaces of everyday life have rarely been subjected to so loving and intense a philosophic examination as in Alain's Propos and other books...
...As a result, when the writer is at all controversial in his themes, Maurois is not a dependable guide...
...Art is a rebellion against the world and aims to give it a different form...
...The course of his thought, however, differs in this respect: that he re-establishes those conventions as conventions and not as absolute truths...
...He says in an autobiographical note I have dug up: "I began to write Mouchette when I saw trucks go by below my house, trucks filled with poor souls, surrounded by armed men, their hands on their knees, their faces covered with dust, but erect, very erect, their heads lifted high, with that dignity which Spaniards maintain in the most atrocious misery...
...Mouchette is a masterpiece...
...If one wants passion one must go to the real madmen and nihilists, whom Maurois, of course, carefully skirts-C?©line, Bloy, Genet, and Bernanos...
...In Val?©ry's thought there is nothing even remotely resembling Maurois' interpretation of convention as a remedy for society's ills and disorders...
...He doesn't claim that these hypotheses are true...
...But what is true is that if I had not seen these things, I would not have written Mouchette...
...But I doubt whether anyone who knows French literature more deeply will get very much out of Maurois' bland, cautious, elegant pages...
...Art, as I say, is unfair and well-intentioned madmen like Burroughs or Mailer, radicals in the approved, progressive manner, write boring books with a worked-up passion and a fake intensity, whereas Bernanos, most of whose ideas appal us, wrote flaming, beautiful books that one cannot put down...
...The magisterial aspect of criticism, its cool good judgment, rather than the tentative spirit that feels its way among textures and moods, prevails in this book...
...His essay on Alain, a writer who has never received his due over here, is perhaps the most engaging and lively...
...But exactly where it goes is another, complicated story, which M. Maurois would rather not bring up...
...And, even if one supposed that they had been interrogated, they were incapable of defending themselves...
...He is certain, indeed, that they will one day be surpassed and replaced...
...On Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Malraux, Maurois treads warily past all the controversies and thus renders these writers strangely flat and unappealing...
...But the conclusion Maurois draws from this seems too pat and too consolatory...
...He makes certain hypotheses about the world that enable him con-viently to group observed phenomena...
...Neither total rejection nor total consent...
...So a recipe for modern chaos and unpredictability is foisted on Val?©ry that makes hash of his entire ironic approach to such matters...
...Only Camus, whose classical temper makes him congenial to Maurois, takes on sudden life...
...I plead for a true realism against a mythology that is both illogical and deadly, and against romantic nihilism whether bourgeois or allegedly revolutionary I believe in the necessity of some kind of rule and of some kind of order...
...This attitude is a conservative one, in the strict sense of the word...
...That was his positive value...
...It is that which they would have had to learn beforehand...
...The publication of Bernanos' short novel, Mouchette (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 127 pp., $3.95), gives us a good opportunity...
...All of these qualities, not so common that they can be scorned, are to be found in his short survey of modern French writing, From Proust to Camus (Double-day, 368 pp., $5.95), and they will provide the neophyte with an excellent introduction to the subject...
...If any writer ever got him angry, irritated him or drove him up the wall, he has managed to conceal it...
...but only the faintest echo of these unseemly struggles reaches his ear or gets into his prose...
...A violent anti-Semite, a royalist, a man who made a cult of the dead soldiers of World War I, a Catholic who hated the hierarchy, an excoriator of evil who saw the world corroded by an invincible malignancy, Bernanos wrote some of our age's most powerful novels...
...Today, when literature is filled with fake madmen, with pitiful imitators of the authentic madmen of the recent literary past, it is useful to go back to writers like him...
...Naturally, I have not deliberately decided to draw a novel from it...
...And more, I could not be able to say the admiration I felt for the courage, the dignity, with which I have seen these poor souls die...
...He ranks him with the greatest writers of the recent period, Proust, Val?©ry and Claudsl...
...I was struck by the horrible injustice of the powerful who, in order to condemn these wretches, spoke to them in a language which is alien to them...
...but there is also the poignance of Bernanos' voice...
...A great deal of the literature he covers came out of terrible suffering, enormous contradictions, lacerating inner conflicts...
...he is simply being himself, polite, well-mannered, just...
...To make a still life two elements are necessary: a painter and an apple...
...They would be shot the next morning...
...Having as an adolescent made a clean slate of things, he re-establishes in his maturity those conventions he had once rejected...
...To change the world, however, one must start with the world as it is...
...He is not playing deaf...
...I do not blame him for avoiding it...
...There lies the hideous imposture...
...His essays on Val?©ry and Gide are models of what a critic can say after he has firmly driven out of his mind all the disturbing, illogical, passionate and murky questions that naturally cling to these two writers...
...Val?©ry would have said, if pressed, that conventions have been present from the start and that thought and action takes them for granted and goes on from there...
...Maurois is determined to make sense from what was originally the ferment and chaos of inspiration, exalted moments, glancing insights, and he will do it even at the cost of some slight distortion...
Vol. 49 • November 1966 • No. 23
