F • •
iction
Frontiers and Ferv ours
WHEN one is prodding among the four-and-twenty breeds of nationalism that have been half-baked in the post-War pie, there is one attractive thing about an otherwise dismal sight : the birds do begin to sing—of their Celtic twilights, their Baltic mists, or their Alsatian Mountains. In the last analysis their refrain is the cry of all the modern world, the cry of the individual to the surviving orthodoxies, "Leave us alone." In politics the cry is poignant but not always effectual : nationalism, like personality, is a cannibal and feeds upon the lesser of its species, and these two novels, translated from the German, provide us with tragic private data in regard to the " public " problem of Alsace-Lorraine.
Herr Schickele, seeing the problem through the eyes of the sentimental, good-natured and sensitive Claus von Breusch- heim, takes matters less tragically and at an easier gait than Frau Dill. Claus is a wealthy, youngish landowner, of a class which has remained aloof from politics. Ile lives in a large house with his father, mother and a fanatical half-brother and his wife. Their family is a complicated net of relationships flung across both sides of the frontier, and Claus, merely by eschewing extremes and cultivating his own garden, watching wistfully the tragi-comic circus of his province, tends to tecome, nationally, an Alsatian. Through him and the halting course of his love affair, the whole glory of Alsace, caught between the Black Forest and the Vosges, is rendered in pas- sages of surpassing beauty. Each character—journalists, Communists, men of the Rhine Guard, petty officials and a score of others—presents his facet of the problem. The book moves slowly, spasmodically, with slight incident and no plot worth mentioning. Ernst, the half-brother, is a rabid neurotic, who is now as furiously pro-French as, in the War, he had been pro-German. By his fevers he dominates the home and provides a spirited domestic comedy which, in spite of its in- distinctness, is the book's chief merit. His end wavers some- where between the tragic and the absurd.
The book is not convincing, and in its final cumulative
effect it is as though the reader were taken into a half-lighted ballroom where a brilliant assembly of people, actually alive outside of fiction, are discernible only as an elusive glitter. Mussolini, Poincare and many notable men easily to be identified appear under thin disguises, and one has the impression that
the other characters also are taken from life, without sufficient refashioning in the imagination. It is a long book and in some respects a tedious and annoying one, but, read patiently, it discloses a fervent and delicate mind.
The tragedy of Alsace-Lorraine, the iniquity of frontiers, weighs less upon the old than upon the young who are being brought up in times of transition and bitterness. In Herr Sehickele's book the cloud hangs over Claus von Breuschheim's son ; in Frau Dill's story, the agony of the present dilemma of lay Mathieu is sharpened by the fact that her son's future may be at the mercy of factious relatives on either side of the fron- tier. Loyalties conflict painfully. Her dead husband has been in the German Army ; his brother, by chance, has been on the French side. Her own family are of German sym- pathies; her husband's family, in their small Lorraine garrison town, have become pro-French. She returns after the War from Germany to Lorraine into this antipathetic atmosphere. The virtue of the book lies in its vivid presentation of the con- fusion of the Saar and the gloom of Lorraine, now that the gay German life has gone and a deadly French provinciality has settled upon it. With less nobility and sensitiveness than Herr Schickele's story, Frau Dill's cuts more deeply because it has narrowed and sharpened its purpose. Isy Mathieu, in spite of the forced symbolism of her love affair with her pro- French brother-in-law, to which the reader has to submit in this kind of work, is an unforgettable figure.
Returning to vulgar, urban England, we make the acquaint- ance again of an old friend, Egg Pandervil and his son Nicky, whom we left, in Mr. Bullett's previous novel, in his bath. Old friends in fiction seem usually a trifle shabby on their second appearance but Egg, adoring his son and drifting into senility, is a welcome figure. The relationship between father and son is portrayed with poetic subtlety and restraint and there are good moments in the story, which would be excellent if we could rid ourselves of the suspicion that Mr. Bullett is remembering how he did it all before. The War snatches Nicky from the threatenings of a monotonous Pandervil mar- riage and Egg finally goes mad. There is one utter failure, Nicky's wife ; she flickers uncertainly between life and limbo one success worth remarking, the prosperous Uncle Algy ; one disappointment, Nicky himself. To take us to France with Nicky was, I think, an error of judgment. The fashionable quietness on the Western Front is becoming tiresome if it is going to lure novelists of the calibre of Mr. Bullett away from their art. The episode comes near to spoiling the final scenes of Egg Pandervil's madness, which reveal emotional resources that Mr. Bullett will, I hope, draw upon again.
V. S. PRITCHETT.
Previous page
