THREE PURSUITS
Emerson, Donald
Three Pursuits Promise at Dawn, by Romain Gary. Harper. 337 pp. $5. The Empty Canvas, by Alberto Moravia. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. 306 pp. $4.50. Adrift in Soho, by Colin Wilson. Houghton...
...He finds with dismay that Cecilia is so impenetrably stupid that there is no character to grasp, though he maddens himself trying...
...These men of courage can win battles knowing they cannot win the war, but they keep alive the dream of ultimate victory for mankind...
...Gary's world is filled with despicable men, but among them are others who see man's true enemies in stupidity, total righteousness, mediocrity, and servility...
...Moravia treats the relation of Dino and Cecilia seriously, as essential to this theme...
...For ten years Dino has lived oil his mother's money, despising the money and thinking of his mother only when he needs more...
...Harry has the potential of shaping up into an ordinary young man, but the Dino of Moravia's The Empty Canvas is so selfish, witless, and instinctual at thirty-five that one despairs...
...The Italian title was La Noia, which means something that comprises such terms as boredom, ennui, or tedium vitae...
...229 pp...
...Harry, recently discharged from the RAF, thinks he would like to be a writer...
...His mother, deserted shortly after Ro-main's birth, lived a hand-to-mouth existence while he was growing up...
...The earlier works as well might have served, save for the reservation that Gary's Promise at Dawn is possibly his best work and Wilson's Adrift in Soho unquestionably his worst...
...That lumpish characterization of Wilson's youngster adrift in Soho is not unjust...
...When he stops painting, he decides he might as well live in her villa, a stilling place lor his tree spirit, but when he gets there he just as impulsively decides he might as well go back to Rome...
...Houghton Mifflin...
...He kept his courage and his humor and his hope...
...Although a sound principle holds that one must grant the author his subject and criticize only what he makes of it, there are subjects and subjects...
...Both are triflers beside the Gary who grew up with "the certitude that one day I should help my fellow men . . . give back the earth to those who ennoble it with their courage and warm it with their love...
...When she goes off with another lover on Ditto's money, Dino drives wildly about the country waiting for an unwilled impulse to make him twist the wheel...
...Gary emerges as a man who survived shattering blows lo body and spirit during the war...
...This memoir and the two novels clearly rank themselves, and if the study of boredom is superior to the sketch of rootlessness, the picture of courage is better than both...
...The man of forty-five remembers humiliations which steeled for life the ambition of the boy of eight...
...he even spends several hours at home and in London pursuing his craft...
...But chiefly he floats about Soho, sight-seeing among the beats, until Wilson has exhausted his parade of types and lets Harry decide he would rather hold a job than work at being a bum...
...He has moments of intense feeling (he calls them "brainstorms"), but they produce no deep effect, and he remains adrift without drifting very far, like Wilson's novel...
...He learned that as an artist he would miss his mark with every attempt, and he had the courage to say, "I shall never stop trying...
...Moravia undoubtedly knew his own mind in choosing boredom for his subject, and he makes one feel Dino's oppression of spirit and the repugnance the episodes with Cecilia finally arouse...
...Or to put it differently, a complete man is more interesting than part of a man or an unformed lump...
...the three books, even as literary performances, reflect this, and the chief characters, taken together, provide a powerful demonstration in morality...
...3.50...
...Reviewed by Donald Emerson The memoir of Romain Gary and the novels of Alberto Moravia and Colin Wilson force the reader to comparisons which are a practical affirmation of values...
...Unlike Camus' impressively consistent outsider, Harry suddenly lapses from indifference, for no very good reason...
...The Empty Canvas is good Moravia, but its subject condemns it to being tedious...
...Courage, boredom, and uncertainty are the contrasting dominant notes...
...By then, his achievement seemed to him only an act of justice and reparation for her miserable life, her spent vitality, and her indomitable courage...
...In her passionate attachment she was determined to turn her son from a Russian Jew into a Frenchman, and before her death she had fixed her dreams so firmly in his consciousness that he achieved nearly everything she predicted...
...Harry is not one of those angry Englishmen who whine so plaintively...
...but there is little save physique to make either character recognizably human...
...Nor should one question the hap py accident which brings the Frenchman's seventh, the Italian's twelfth, and the Englishman's fifth book to American readers at the same time...
...At times she starved herself...
...Theoretically, his intense sex life should be interesting, for sex is supposedly the great popularizer of fiction...
...Romain Gary received his European etlucation in a harsh school...
...Wilson's Harry decides he belongs among the squares, and Moravia's Dino discovers a resigned serenity in which he can go on living without hope...
...Literary skill alone cannot sustain equal interest in a mature and experienced man, a spoiled adolescent nearing middle age, and a feckless, youngster shunning the dismal prospect of going to work...
...Then Cecilia comes to bed, and Dino seeks through her to reestablish a sense of reality outside himself...
...The son's portrait is loving tribute to a tenacious spirit, but the book is autobiography and self-portrait as well...
...Dino experiences lethargy and impotence rooted in his inability to feci the existence of any reality outside himself...
...The come-to-realize ending is ridiculous, but Moravia proves his skill with his subject...
...To turn to Romain Gary's Promise at Dawn is to breathe fresh air in a large, tumultuous world where no evil is lacking and no evil can ultimately defeat courage, hope, and love...
...One must admit that one has been bored, and that the boredom of the dull, perfectly portrayed, is dullness itself...
...Not here...
...The creative failure emphasized in the title of the translation is of less moment than his boredom and despair...
...He survives the smash, fortunately or not, and suddenly discovers that reality exists...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
