Fin de Siecle
The Child of Montmartre is a trio of autobio- graphical sketches first published in the early 1900s and not properly a novel at all, though some sort of mild fictionising has probably gone on and Ldautaud's slow unfolding of the characters of his profligate parents is done with the full appearance of a writer calculating, and bringing off, his effects. Ldautaud's most accessible charm, of which one well might grow weary over longer stretches, lies in the way he allows his little world the courage of its weaknesses, The bastard son of a sou/Jleur at the Comddie-Francaise and a minor flighty actress, he spent his evenings, and a good part of his days as well, in the company of whores and stage-ladies and no one has better caught the strong pull of the louche for those who are capable of feeling keenly enough but distrust emotion : 'I found relaxation in these colourful places; life in them was many-hued, after the inert, monotonous masterpieces.' He comes back to this more than once, commenting in an aside on 'the great books we read later on with either scepticism or envy.' He is careful not to specify the master- pieces he is running away from, but he obviously has a healthy down on them. Unhealthy, of course, would be the final word on most of his attitudes : `For is not this very fatigue of love, that glazes and encircles their eyes and hardens their faces a little, the most exciting part of their beauty?' What makes his book such an original and rewarding experience is the scrupulous, slightly ironic honesty with which he sets it all down, the failures if anything more than the conquests. It would be misleading to think of him as a sort of footnote to La utrec's posters : there is surprisingly little 'period' detail, unless you are prepared to find the reiteration of song-titles and street-names evoca- tive. His tone is modern, deprecatory but utterly self-assured, and the descriptions of his near-affair with his rediscovered mother, of his father's rammish successes and miserable death-bed, and of his own first affair with the sister of a friend (whom he did not like: he did not much like his friends) are delicate and personal achievements, possible only because you have been early per- suaded of his trustworthiness as an observer of the limited range of his own feelings.
Now we know what happens to bad Frenchmen when they die. They go into American novels. The Day on Fire is at the top of my list for a private annual award to he known as the Golden Turnip. For reasons one trusts he will not blab about (the fervid declarations of his foreword having nothing to do with reason), Mr. Ullman has written a 600- page book based on the life of Rimbaud, poet and pervert. Rimbaud becomes Claude Morel and Verlaine Maurice Druard. Other people become other people, too, though the Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia is the Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia,
hich may or may not please Haile Selassie.
. . Morel's thoughts, conversations, and cor- respondence are a composite of the factual and fictional—but with the imagined . . . predomin- ating.' One does not want to labour the point, but even if Mr. Ullman had a creative genius exactly equivalent to that of his victim there would still be a place for a couple of awkward questions. As it is . . . But let Mr. Ullman's prose work its own magic :
Pit another café, not far distant, two other men named Leconte de Lisle and Sully Prudhomme were deep in argument about the verse of the late Charles Baudelaire. 'You are wrong, all wrong, he was the greatest!' declared Leconte de Lisle warmly. 'Look—there's Zola going by. Call him over. Ask him what he thinks.' . . . `Zola?' Sully Prudhomme snorted. 'Mon Dieu, what does Emile know about poetry?—And besides, he won't drink.'
It is conceivable that this travelogue, with sub- titles by one of the greatest French poets, will have a popular success. One's only . comfort is the thought that when it comes to be filmed Rimbaud- Morel will have to be played by Eartha Kitt.
Amongst Those Missing is another strange one —an impossible, largely unmotivated story carried through with the greatest imaginable coolness. It concerns the fate of five survivors of an air-crash over British Guiana. One, badly wounded, quickly commits suicide so that the others can reach safety unimpeded, and of those that remain the two men —one good, one bad—both have reasons for not wanting to take the easiest route. The girls are nicely contrasted, a half-caste American and a starchy English blonde, and neither allows stand- ards to slip just because they are marooned in a jungle. Lipsticks are always on the go and smalls washed daily. Near the end, as the party goes down river in an inflated dinghy, they are three and then two, as, in a finale of breathtaking impu- dence, the English girl takes to the bush. It all goes to show what Defoe knew so well. If you surround your fable with enough raw detail and are prepared to go into how things are done, people will swallow almost anything. A Gift From the Boys is a thin little story about an American gangster deported to Sicily and the bodyguard, reporter and girl in his entourage. It has an un- necessarily involved plot and three good Buchwald jokes.
JOHN COLEMAN
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