When God Slumbers

THE WEAKLING and THE ENEMY (219 pp.)--Francois Mauriac--Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3).

Francois Mauriac, like his English cousin-in-letters, Graham Greene, is a connoisseur of corruption. A Roman Catholic, he believes that evil is as real as sunshine, and that man must learn to look the Devil in the face. In this new book, Mauriac's U.S. publishers have brought together two of his short novels. Though The Enemy was first printed in 1935 and The Weakling only last year, there is good reason for putting them side by side: both have as their theme the vulnerability of innocence.

The Enemy is the story of a young man named Fabien whose pious mother does her best to shield him from life. Fabien knows nothing of "the strident clamor of desire . . . the storm that rages about the ship of humanity when God slumbers at the stern." Twice a year, however, a gay and worldly woman named Fanny comes to visit his mother, and her visits somehow suggest delights the boy can hardly specify. At 22, Fabien meets Fanny again. Fabien drops his theological studies and becomes her lover, and then, torn by self-anguish, drops her in turn and determines to make his peace with God. But the state of peace with God, says Mauriac, the novelist cannot show.

"It is the mark of our slavery and our wretchedness that we can . . . paint a faithful portrait only of the passions."

The Weakling is a sterner story, and plainly a parable of humanity caught between competing ideologies. "To make hate," says Mauriac, "is comforting. It rests the mind and relaxes the nerves." And Paula Cernes, a middle-class girl married to a decayed baron, has been making hate for 13 years. She lives in a tangle of venom with her husband's family, and despises her son Guillaume, a backward child, because he is so much like his father. To spite them all, Paula sends the boy to take lessons from the local schoolteacher, an open Communist. The schoolteacher brings the boy out a little, and Guillaume is ecstatically happy; never before has he been treated so considerately.

But his happiness does not last. The teacher turns Guillaume away in the end because he will not traffic with "aristocrats." In a scene of gruesome effectiveness, Guillaume and his father drown themselves. "In [the boy's] suffering body," concludes Mauriac, "a human spirit had lain unawakened."

For all his didactic intent, Novelist Mauriac writes no tracts; he is too impressed by the complexity of human behavior to believe that it can be presented in terms of any pat system. Mauriac's world is neither spacious nor brilliant, but it has something of the strong austerity of good Romanesque.

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