Love & Death

AFTERMATH--Jules Remains--Knopf ($2.75).

Verdun, the eighth and climactic volume of Jules Romains' vast Men of Good Will (TIME, Jan. 8, 1940), was pure holocaust on the heroic scale. It was his attempt to show a nation, a continent, an age in the paroxysm of war. It was the heaviest piece of orchestration Romains' gigantic project had yet demanded of him.

Aftermath is the hour of silence after shock, still resonant with annihilation. In it Verdun's great orchestra is reduced, and human life withdrawn to its deepest, simplest roots. Book 17, Vorge Against Quinette (first half of Aftermath) is a cruel and sinuous piece of chamber music by a few instruments. Its theme is death. Book 18, The Sweets of Life, is even quieter, like a gentle, ruminative improvisation. Its theme is love and all that expands from it. Yet on Romains' great talents, these deep and quiet books are scarcely less demanding than Verdun.

Romains handles death in its purest, most terrible form: murder for murder's sake. Vorge Against Quinette is a first-class psychological thriller built on the characters of two men: the wretched bookbinder Quinette who committed his first murder in Volume I and has kept up a planned, gratuitous, sterile string of them backstage ever since; a newcomer. Claude Vorge, a writer, who represents those deliberately irrational strains in art and conduct called dadaism, nihilism, diabolism.

Quinette is a half-educated man of action. Vorge is a frantic would-be sophisticate, a man of thought. Yet their pathology is the same. Vorge has only to hear of Quinette in connection with a woman's mysterious disappearance to assume (on no grounds) his guilt. He seeks him out and, in a state of mind half parlor-game, half maniacal sincerity, woos him as a "Master," a "Dark Angel," the modest herald of Rimbaud's "heyday of assassination." He drives the tricky, mousy little murderer nearly witless with hypnosis and fear. Inevitably too, he is no more enmeshing than enmeshed. In rage and shame as an amateur, a rejected disciple, he is drawn at length into a botched attempt at sexual murder.

The most brilliant chapters of Vorge Against Quinette fall short of their model, those terrible dialogues of search-and-dodging in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment. But it is no mere tour de force. In it Romains throws much clinical light on those poisonous chemistries which eat at the centres of a petty bourgeois, whether he be a frustrated shopkeeper or a fourth-rate, envious artist.

The Sweets of Life is a journal kept for a season by Pierre Jallez, the young poet through whom Romains represents everything he holds sane and prolific in art and in life. Having saved some money from newspaper work just after the war, Jallez has decided to spend the winter at Nice.

"Whatever the next ten years may bring, I don't want to reproach myself for having made bad use of the breathing space thus offered me by fate." His journal is, accordingly, a record of beauty and of pleasure, intensified and at the same time sobered by war.

The story is just as leisured and simple. Jallez states its theme: "In the world that the war has left us--for how long I wonder --love, surely, is the least futile of all human activities." He has two light, classical affairs: a disciplined friendship with a cultured, unhappily married woman; a no less disciplined and beautifully told love affair with a young working-class girl of the Old Town. Lyrical and delicate, this affair abruptly breaks off. Jallez has work with the League of Nations. He is well aware of its shortcomings, but hopeful nevertheless. "It is a temporary shanty put up on the site which will later be occupied by the Universal Church."

The design and purpose of Men of Good Will, in this volume as in others, is clear and noble. Its handling is so serious, exact and ample, that it is extremely difficult, page by page, to sense any lack. Romains is highly adequate to his great task: his adequacies hang on the walls of his work like so many diplomas. The only question is whether adequacy is enough. An undertaking of such grandeur as this requires something that no amount of intelligence, intention and industry can combine to earn: a corresponding grandeur of treatment which French genius, specializing in minor perfections, has rarely if ever produced.

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