Nerve War in the Caribbean

LIANA--Martha Gellhorn--Scribner ($2.50).

In wartime, character is a military objective. In modern fiction, many a character succumbs to the stratagems of those who wage the ceaseless, ruthless war of nerves.

Novelist Martha Gellhorn (Mrs. Ernest Hemingway) is no political novice. She knows how individuals are tormented, twisted, their weaknesses exploited, their characters warped; she knows how often and how subtly their aspirations are distorted and their hopes destroyed. But even in a novel as neatly executed as Liana she does not manage to grain her political understanding into the narrative details. In this respect she is neither more nor less skillful than most of her contemporaries.

Ladies and Lovers. Liana is laid on a Caribbean island in the period between the fall of France and Admiral Darlan's joining the Allies. Much of its action revolves around the island's wealthiest citizen, Marc Royer, 44, blue-eyed, determined, unimaginative, who scarcely ever thinks of France, but loves the island, the sugar cane, his trading schooners, and his bachelor's pleasures: shooting blue pigeons in the hills, fishing outside the reefs, playing cards and getting drunk in the island's one cafe. He also likes his quiet mulatto girl, Liana, and is good to her.

Although the war seems far away, occasional boatloads of torpedoed sailors bring it home to the islanders. In other ways, too, the war washes against their shores--as when a newcomer named Pinelli arrives to marry the Mayor's daughter and tell how the Jews caused France's fall. (The schoolteacher, who had been through the fall of France, calls Pinelli a dangerous fool.)

Some time in the midst of this remote excitement Marc Royer marries Liana. The white ladies are outraged. Liana is troubled. Quickened by the thought of being Madame Royer, filled with childlike pleasure at the new dresses sent from Florida, she is shocked at her new position of complete isolation from both her own people in their shacks on the hills and the white people of the town. She is also restless and bored, tired of Marc's aging amorousness.

When Marc reads at night, Liana is sullen. When he tries to get her to read, too, he discovers that she cannot. Embarrassed, aware that the town will talk, he hires Pierre Vauclain, the schoolteacher, to teach her.

Pierre is decent, Liana in awe of him, Marc troubled: "First I am jealous and then I am delighted because they look so suitable together. . . ."

Trouble does not start with Pierre and Liana, nor with Marc. It begins when Pinelli finds Pierre in the cafe, says, "You are thinking what an agreeable afternoon you had, making love to the beautiful black wife of our honored millionaire." Pierre knocks him down.

Marc makes another contribution to unrest when he forces Pinelli to tell each white family individually that he lied. Then, with an ogrelike millionaire's will, he expels Pinelli from the island. By the time the scandal quiets down, Pierre and Liana have become lovers.

Victims and Weapons. This is a political novel. Its atmosphere of sultry gloom, its picture of a dozing colony where nobody ever really feels alert and aware, cover a record of the manipulation of the social nerves of class feeling, national conflict, racial conflict, the misunderstanding between generations and between the educated and the uneducated.

Through 285 pages of brooding, twilit misery, Martha Gellhorn's practical, brisk writing makes its way without a pitch or a roll. She suggests how the social nerves of the island are manipulated, then changes the subject before it engulfs the story. But in so doing she fails to make clear just who is doing the manipulating. In other ways as well she leaves the reader unsure of her apparent political points.

If, as seems likely, she meant Marc to exemplify the prewar French imperialist who tried to make France's colonies prosperous, literate, industrious, the story is confused by his Bohemian tastes. If his marriage to Liana is meant to show the sincerity of French concern for the well-being of the Negroes, it is muddled by his emotion. If young Pierre is meant to symbolize the France of reformed and the Popular Front, his very presence on the island is an unsolved mystery. If Liana is meant to be the victimized native, her willful intensification of disaster is incredible.

Novelists have trouble writing about the war of nerves because they fight it so hard, and because their books are such potent weapons in it. Liana is an interesting example of both these troubles.

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