Vampire & Son

THE IRON MOTHER--Charles Braibant --Harper ($2.50).

French critics have hailed Charles Braibant for his "wholesome" qualities, have welcomed The Iron Mother because it is a "change" from the pathological novel of Proustian introspection. Yet, for all its vivid phrases, for all its objectivity, for all its wry humor, The Iron Mother welters in a family situation which can hardly be called wholesome and which should be pathological enough to suit even the most exacting of Freudians.

M. Braibant's story is the old one of the vampire mother whose dominating ways kill any nascent sense of independence in her children. The "iron" mother, Marlise Bertaud, gets her tremendous power through avarice. She worships at a strong box, spends her evenings balancing her accounts, is as shrewd as a Chinese banker in lending petty sums and collecting five per cent, no more, no less.

Marlise was once a loving wife. But her husband died young, from eating a whole chicken cooked in white wine and three stuffed pigeons at a wedding breakfast, and Marlise was left a fairly well-to-do widow with a 14-year-old son. Her magnificent energy could find only one outlet in mid-19th Century Pargny, that of managing what her husband had left her.

From this point on the worship of the franc dominates the book as it dominated the books of Balzac. Marlise gets an esthetic pleasure out of contemplating her swelling revenues. She cannot walk down a road of Pargny without reflecting that so much of her money is in such-and-such a field, or house, or shop, for she has become the fond owner of a grand assortment of mortgages. When Aime, the growing son, shows that he is a dreamer. Marlise contemptuously excludes him from any knowledge of her own little private banking business. Warned that Aime will not be able to protect the Bertaud property after her death. Marlise is still unable to share her control of monies, mortgages, farmland. She has an instinctive realization that she will outlive her son, who wilts and dies in his 50's without ever daring to tell Marlise of his mistress and his bastard son, Remy.

Aime will seem pretty much of a nincompoop to the unprejudiced. A youth of many talents (he gives promise, at different times, of succeeding as a sculptor, a medievalist, a writer), he is unable to assert himself long enough to give any of his abilities a chance. He dares not tell Marlise of his mistress. Andree, and their child, for he knows that the "iron"' mother would never permit him to marry anyone as poor as Andree. But Marlise. after Aime's death, recognizes all her own qualities in her illegitimate grandson, forthwith makes him her heir.

The story of The Iron Mother is told by a wise peasant who has been Marlise's admirer and Aime's friend. His complete acceptance of the French way of doing things, of French values, may be what constitutes the "wholesomeness" of the book; at any rate, he never goes out of his way to lecture Marlise for her avarice. If it had not ruined Aime, he would have regarded it as normal.

The peasant-narrator is a philosopher with ideas about everything. He tells what he thinks of the an den regime, of Napoleon, of the bourgeois king. Louis Philippe, of Napoleon III, of the Franco-Prussian war, of the French foreign policy that led to that war, of M. Thiers and the Third Republic, of the Paris Commune, of the changing status of women through all this time. He also expatiates upon the qualities of French soil, wine and scenery in the different provinces surrounding Pargny, which is on the River Aisne. All this gives The Iron Mother, which might have been just another story of a dominating female, a salty, Gallic flavor, which will take U. S. readers into the atmosphere of a culture that is far, far away in spirit. The translation, by Vyvyan Holland, is supple, muscular--French prose rendered in good English prose.

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