Fiction's Maignot Line

WORK AND PLAY (Books XXI and XXII of Men of Good Will)--Jules Romains--Knopf ($3).

In a modest apartment on the eleventh floor of the Latino-Americana apartments in Mexico City, Jules Romains is at work on the 13th volume of Men of Good Will. He has been writing his vast serial for 13 year. He writes in longhand on his mahogany desk in the combination dining and living room, his back to the window that overlooks Mexico City to the south and, beyond it, the mountain ranges hemming in the Valley of Mexico. For six or seven hours each day, he traces out the involved characters and the complicated situations of the giant novel that already runs to 5,822 printed pages.

Whatever final judgment is passed on Men of Good Will or its author, its plan, the way it was written, the view of life and fiction it embodies, are likely to stand as one of the incredible efforts of the human imagination. It is a one-man attempt to bring order into the fortress of confusion and agony that is modern Europe, to make its disasters intelligible and its political and philosophical incoherence understandable.

Ten-Year Plan. Romains is one of the most prolific of living writers. When he started writing Men of Good Will, he had already turned out many volumes--Death of a Nobody, which won sincere critical praise, popular plays on the level of Broadway thrillers, poems, esoteric novels, mildly erotic, but too keenly perceptive to be pornographic, expositions of his theory of unanimism, experiments in telepathy, in Extra-Retinal Vision. He was also a lecturer in philosophy, and a one-man conspiracy with hush-hush dealings with people like King Leopold of Belgium, General Gamelin, Premier Daladier, Otto Abetz, then Chief of Nazi Propagandist in France--under the delusion (as ingenuously described by him in his Seven Mysteries of Europe) that they were Men of Good Will.

A man of medium height, with dark straight hair, blue eyes, a lined humorous face and a big nose, Romains was 35 when he got the idea for Men of Good Will. For ten years he prepared to write it. He consciously planned his life and writing to climax in the creation of his masterpiece. In his country house in Touraine he worked ten hours a day for four months each year. In Paris, visitors, the mail and the telephone slowed him down. But he kept two secretaries busy. One of them was Lise Dreyfus, brown-eyed, slim, with brown curls piled high on her head, a Government civil servant who had studied in Germany, England and France. Eight years ago Romains married her. She says, "I became at once wife and secretary."

When the war began, Romains had finished eight volumes of his novel (16 in the French edition). Published in December 1939 was Verdun, a merciless account of World War I slaughter, and a harrowing picture of inhuman French officership.

Tragedy and Novelty. Through the months of the phony war Romains worked for the French Government. When France fell, Romains and his wife fled to the U.S. For 18 months they lived quietly in Manhattan, had no intimate friends except Refugee Stefan Zweig and his wife, whose suicide (TIME, March 2, 1942) was also a terrible tragedy to the Romains. In February 1942, Romains went to Mexico City to lecture at the National University. There the Romains stayed "because life is easier, cheaper and it is a new thing to know."

They live the life of exiles, lonely, with almost no mail and no contact with readers, with an occasional visit to a nightclub, a frequent afternoon horseback ride in Chapultepec Park, with almost no social life and with the unremitting hunger for intellectual companionship that lives with exiles like an uninvited guest.

The Book. The 59 chapters that make up the two parts of Work and Play are slower going than the previous books. The France that they describe has come out of World War I without knowing how deeply its strength has been sapped. In some ways it is healthier: the vice and crime that Romains described as characteristic of prewar France is now hidden or distant. The high-minded liberal intellectuals talk vaguely of Russia. The relaxations are banal. The moneymaking is easy, and tiresome. The love affairs and divorces are equally casual. The French suffer from the delusion that the Third Republic is running Europe. They patronize the English, deplore U.S. blindness in keeping out of the League of Nations, wonder if a standing army of 650,000 will be too big. Some familiar characters appear:

Jerphanion, now vice president of the Radical-Socialist Party. He delivers a long, dull speech (which Romains unblushingly describes as "great"). With an ex-diplomat he investigates a death among the mountain people of his native province--a death which might be from hard conditions of life in a snowbound farmhouse without medical aid, or might be murder.

Haverkamp. He is still making millions, and looks back with relish on his rise from a poor real-estate speculator to financier. In Work and Play he sets about divorcing his wife (and ex-secretary). He also gets mixed up, to his embarrassment, with architects, interior decorators and his private secretary, backs a play for his mistress and tries to hire politically ambitious Jerphanion as his secretary.

Laulerque. The old disillusioned conspirator who tried to make a secret international order work for the common good is embarrassed at Jerphanion's tentative project for a new secret society that would have liberal aims, honest methods and yet be as effective as the Communists.

Work and Play seems as exhausted as France. The conflicts are spiritless, the dialogues read like editorials, the goings-on of all the characters, with no one of whom the reader feels akin, seem meaningless. The pathos of the novel is extraneous. It lies in the reader's dark foreknowledge of what was so soon to happen to this France that Remains describes. All these picnics, love affairs, speeches, quarrels, schemes, crimes, recollections, arguments about the future, projects for preventing war--this, Romains seems to say, was he best that French intelligence was doing. Few of the actions were bad. Most of them were well-intentioned. It was not treachery, viciousness, wickedness, nor even laziness that stifled them. It was simply indecision, confusion, uncertainty, lack of friends, lack of leadership, and the willingness to blame others for the plight of France which resulted from more causes than any Frenchman knew.

Failure and Achievement. Thus at its eleventh volume Men of Good Will is a monumental failure. Like the Maginot Line itself, it seemed flawless on the blueprints. Like that triumph of engineering, it is full of trap doors and secret passages and it has room in it for an army which, however, might be more useful in the field. Readers may study it with something of the same interest with which the German General Staff and Foreign Office studied the archives of the French Intelligence, Finance Ministry and Foreign Office when they captured Paris. But few will read it for pleasure.

But if Men of Good Will fails as a novel, as an exemplification of Remains' philosophy it is an achievement.

Romains calls his philosophy unanism. An attempt to find a living and usable unity in the shattered, disunited, warring and unhappy modern world, unanism is a conscious decentralization of thought. By its terms (which Romains makes unnecessarily complicated), the old unities that once provided the cement of social life--the sovereign, the church, the family--had lost their power to give zest and meaning to the everyday doings of men.

A new unity was needed, and where was it to be found? The deep love for one's native country, to whose power in World War I all France gave eternal testimony, could not stand alone to justify the slaughter at Verdun. The old generous dream of a new world, where all would share alike in the abundance that all created--a dream born in the bloody gutters of Paris in the days of the guillotine--could not stand up against the ghastly reality of Bolshevism. The liberal hope of an intelligently adjusted international order of compromise and arbitration could not stand up against the expiring incompetence of the League of Nations. And each new vision of a world brotherhood was weighed down by the tragic fate of its predecessors.

To Romains much of the error lay in the antiquated habits of thought of men, who assumed the existence of unities in life (and made practical plans on this assumption) where, in fact, none existed. Novels that showed life revolving around a single character, he believed, contributed to the gigantic individualistic delusion.

Life does not revolve around the individual, said Jules Romains. His importance is rather his place in, and movement through, the cellular structure of contemporary society. Thus the story of Jerphanion coming to Paris was not his individual career, but his being, as one of the units, in the entity known as Paris, which was greater than the sum of its citizens.

In place of the old concept of character determining destiny, Remains therefore substituted the miscellaneous, accidental, casual, purposeless or only half-purposeful existence. Experience consisted of fugitive impressions, words overheard, scenes glimpsed. Men of Good Will succeeds in communicating what Remains wanted it to communicate: the density and complexity of the modern world. It fails to record its simplicities.

Individuals still suffer, fight, endure loneliness and the bitter failure of all this work in Remains' new novel form as they do in life, and as they always have in good fiction. But in Remains' book their triumphs and their tragedies are alike unmoving. Seen as mere units of the world in which they live, his people seem strangely alike, and strangely unlikable.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.