Prize-Day
Le Bateau Refuge. By Robert Francis. (Gallimard. 15 francs.) THE most important commercial events of the French pub- lishing-year are still the awards of the different literary prizes.
The Goncourt Prize was founded with the best of artistic intentions, when the Academie Francaise, ktoo rigid in its
ideas, first began to ignore the important books of the year in favour of more traditional and less creative productions.
But it is difficult to discover a new masterpiece every year, even more difficult to recognize it in the first year of its pub- lication ; and the Goncourt Academy soon began to make the same blunders as its more official rival. Of all the Goncourt prize-winners of the past few years, I can only remember Proust, Marcel Arland and Andre Malraux. I am told that Maurice Bedel once won this prize ; today I am told that Roger Vereel has just won it.
Le C'apitaine Conan is a plain and straightforward War- novel of the Balkan Front ; or rather a post-War novel,
since the book opens with the armistice. War-novels now arc rarely interesting, but an organization of war-veterans,
somewhat similar to the American Legion, is very active in French politics ; the success of Le Capitainc Conan may be due to the importance of the Croix de Feu movement. It is
the sort of book that one reads and forgets. Vcrcel's style is realistic in an old-fashioned, stilted and slightly pedantic manner, full of cheap colloquialisms and common-place dialogue. The story is good, as far as war-stories go ; murder and war can scarcely help being tragic or dramatic.
Since the Goncourt Academy refused to grant its annual prize to Celine, on the ground of his indecency, the Theo-
phraste Renaudot prize-givers, who proved more broad- minded, have attracted considerable attention on each of their subsequent choices. Louis Francis, their last choice, was already the author of an extremely original historical
novel, Les Nulls snit Enceinles, which passed, two years ago, almost unnoticed. It is all the more disappointing to see his new work, Blanc, universally acclaimed and meet with such success. Blanc might have made a pleasant short- story ; as it stands, though full of accurate observation and competent description, it lacks significant detail. The word- for-word reconstruction of a game of cards is not significant, unless the different details of the game throw a particular light on the action of the whole novel. Blanc is full of such irrelevant realism, which acts as padding in a flimsy story of unrequited and frustrated love. A young diplomat, on leave, discovers that Raymonde, the provincial girl with whom he casually flirts, has loved him passionately ever since her childhood. Blanc then falls in love with her, persuades her to abandon the rich tradesman to whom she is engaged ; she refuses, at the last moment, to follow him on their illegitimate honeymoon. Blanc returns, tivo years later, to find her now engaged to a young civil servant. She still refuses to marry him or to become his mistress. Blanc discovers that Raymonde is already the mistress of the civil servant who finally betrays her. One night, Blanc climbs into Raymonde's room, to find her gone : she is lost in the mountain snows where she dies.
All this might be thought very pretty and material for a charming drawing-room ballad, somewhat like Clementine. But poetry is gradually disappearing from contemporary letters ; the novel must replace it in all those fields that are no longer purely poetic. Thus, Mrs. Virginia Woolf is elegiac ; Proust is epieal and hundreds of minor novelists are satiric. Blanc is un- satisfactory because the author seems content with accepted form ; he telLs a story without attempting to express anything original or new. Blanc is typical of the terrible crisis of originality and significance that now besets the French novelist after all the eccentricities of the past twenty years.
Robert Francis, who has just been chosen for the Femina Prize, offers another example of this spiritual crisis. Ten or fifteen years ago this fluent young author might have created quite a furore in the more advanced circles of the day ; but now his pompous gestures of defiance seem histrionic and obsolete. He only manages to impress the dear old lady- novelists of the Femina jury who find him both dangerous and safe, advanced and traditional, nationalist and revolutionary. Robert Francis played an active part in the riots of February, 1934 ; he wrote a book about them, approving the moral regeneration of the Fascist middle-class: He now pro- claims the necessity of a return to the fairy-tale. His two new volumes, Ler Chute de la Maison de Verre and Le Bateau. Refuge, are a continuation of La Grange aux Trois Belles, which was published two years ago. All three volumes contain the same paraphernalia oft threadbare imagery : the reader wanders through a sort of literary Caledonian Market of all the bric-a-brac of the past few years. But true genius is somehow, like true Christianity, incompatible with the abuse of certain deadly sins ;. and Robert Francis succumbs to vanity. In spite of his melodious prose, pretty-pretty imagination and talented pastiche of Alain Fournier, I must confess that I was unable to wade through more than fifty pages of any of his volumes. The continual repetition of " I " gets on the nerves. In Proust, the personal pronoun is a starting-point, the source of a whole theory ; here, it only symbolizes the author's inability to forget himself or to construct any real fictional characters.
After the dusty attics of the mind where Robert Francis collects his anecdotes and fairy-tales, Anny, by Marc Bernard, acts like a breath of fresh air. Here, at last, we find an honest novel, full of original and deep feeling. Unfortunately, its theme and form are dull : the autobiography of a jealously sensual lover may not interest many readers. It is strange to see how the proletarian intellectual often conforms to the style and artistic traditions, even to the moral tone, of the bourgeois class whose learning he assimilates. Marc Bernard was once a stevedore ; he is still class-conscious in politics, but his novels reveal nothing of his origins except that his style may be more pure, and his psychology more human, more close to the sources of human feeling, than those of many writers of the middle-class. In spite of the weakness of its theme, Anny, of all the prize-winners of 1934, is certainly the only book that deserved a jury's attention.
EDOUAS1D ROD1p.
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