Fiction
The Fall of Paris. By Ilya Ehrenburg. Translated from the Russian by Gerard Shelley. (Hutchinson. los. 6d.)
To commit a novel, which by its form asserts itself to be a free work of imagination, outright from before its first appearance
to the uses of propaganda, is to offend against it seriously, some writers in this island will think ; but Russian novelists have accep- ted the harnessing of their talents to the State and to its expe- diencies, and so it is possible that Ilya Ehrenburg will find nothing odd in the presentation this week to English readers of his new novel, The Fall Of Paris. It is the Stalin Prize Novel of 1942, it comes to us crowned and blessed by M. Maisky, and was ushered in by the B.B.C. in the eight o'clock news on the morning of Premier Stalin's birthday.
Now all of this may be very nice and courteous, but it is irrelevant, and tells the average intelligent reader nothing of what he really wants to know about a new piece of creative writing. In any case, there is no doubt that The Fall Of Paris will do very well on its own steam, for it is a very good novel, and it comes to us in a period of bad novels; it is like a swallow in winter, and will receive all the consideration due to such a visitant. Moreover, it deals on a large scale, and as no other novelist of any nationality has yet tried to, with the most gigantic of contemporary tragedies— the collapse and humiliation of France. It is a very ambitious book, and, without resorting to hyperbole, it can be said to justify a large measure of its ambition. It opens in Rue Cherche-Midi the studio of an obscure and peaceful painter in the early spring of 1936, and it ends in the same studio on 14th July, 1940. Within that crowded span of time it takes us all over Paris and here and there in France, up and down the agitated social scale ; it shows us the public actions and the private anxieties, sins and dreams of a great crowd of characters ; and in close relation to these picked machinators and victims, it endeavours to reveal to us in its process that decay and "dilapidation "—to use de Saint Exupery's word— which hereafter we must view as one of the bitterest calamities of all history.
The book is packed, as it had to be, with disaster, disillusion- ment and sorrow ; and if it contains the seeds of a far-away, general hope—in its simple presentation of the courage and the detached generosity of some of the young, some of that generation hitherto supposed by its elders everywhre to be no good, to be " degenerate " —it attempts no personal consolations. It is nowhere cheap, and it is not sensational. What the author has seen and has to record surpasses comment and exclamation; he lets events and people speak faithfully for themselves—and it is indeed wonderful that, standing still so near his enormous theme, and writing necessarily out of fresh and painful emotion, he manages to be so honest, so steady, and so fair, almost kind, to those terrible personal weak- nesses and dishonesties which brought down ruin on the most civilised and intelligent people in the world.
There are a great many excellent character sketches ; as it deals closely with historical events, it is to some extent a roman a clef, and those public men who, disguised, are impressed into the text of the story, are presented with a just restraint, with an understanding of their sentimentalities, their blindnesses, and their fatal French individualism which is firm and effective, but also mer- ciful. But with the obscure characters who are the tragedy's real victims—the works engineer, the actress girl, the two children of the successful politician, the detached, peaceful painter— the author is at his best, although with them, particularly with the last, he loses a little his sense of French character, and reveals himself as a Russian novelist, thereby gaining certain variations of mood and thought which enrich the whole work. So that although one is reminded sometimes, by the book's shape and its theme, of the later work of Roger Martin du Gard, and sometimes of Jules Romains, such comparison would be mainly technical, for psychologically the book reflects light that is not French, and lacking something of French precision, immediacy, and penetration, is compensatorily gentle and touched with lyricism. But if the author is not French, he knows and loves Paris through and through ; and Paris shines, living and -lovely, on page after
page, even to the very end, in her bedraggled desolation. "German flags were everywhere. German soldiers were marching along the quay : right-left, right-left. Grey-green uniforms. . . . And all around was blue—the sky, the Seine and the houses." This is a good book indeed, and in spite of one or two confusions which seem to be due to haste in correction of proofs, it has been well and sympathetically translated by Mr. Gerard Shelley.
KATE O'BRIEN.
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