A Butterfly for Sale
Memoirs of a Cheat. Sacha Guitry's Tale. (Gollancz. 6s.) Ma. GOLLANCZ grows very quipsome. From an encircling scarlet band we learn that Memoirs of a Cheat has gained the ' Prix Victor Gollancz,' whatever that distinction may be : inside a " Printer's Justification " informs us that of it " no copies have been printed on fine .Lafuma. Every copy is destined for sale in the ordinary way of commerce. Several editions, each consisting of 500 copies, constitute the First Edition." The table of - contents • and the list of illustra- tions appear at the end' instead of, as is more usual, at the beginning of the book. The wording and arrangement of the dust-wrapper and the cover suggest an autobiography inside them we find an attempt at a piece of fiction.
Presumably we should not take these eccentricities too seriously. This book belongs to the type of literature which one usually associates with Christmas presents : it has strayed into print at the wrong time of year, and would have been lost in the company of its ,sterner contemporaries had not Mr. Gollancz, nicely assessing the temperaments of reviewers, intervened with these artificial inducements. In itself Memoirs of a Cheat is as unimportant a trifle as one could find. The idea behind it is promising, and it includes some amusing passages, but as a whole the treatment is common- place. The hero, the youngest member of a family of twelve resident in the Department of Calvados, steals a few sous wherewith to buy himself some marbles. His father, greatly angered at this deviation from virtue, punishes him with the loss of his dinner. The rest of his family dine off a dish of poisoned mushrooms gathered by a deaf-mute uncle, and die as a result. He is thus made an orphan. Eluding (at the expense of the small sum which his father leaves) the unhappi- ness of adolescence in the house of a hated cousin, he grows up as boot-boy and as page in various hotels. In his seven- teenth year he discovers Monaco. He becomes a croupier. He marries, for financial reasons, a woman gambler whose fortunes appear- to --depend on him, attempts to- -cheat for their common advantage, incurs the suspicion of .the casino authorities, and (as- it happens, unfairly) is dismissed. He turns to systematic- cheating as a profession, and with the aid 'of disguises and half a dozen chankes of nationality wins for himself a foritune of 4,000,600 francs, an assortment of motor-cars and mansions, and a hundred mistresses. Then in the rooms at Aix-les-Baini he encounters a man who saved his life-'during the War, • alit-aids hiS gaMbling technique to go into partnership with him, and loses the whole of his "fortune honestly. Now he is a junior emplOyee in a firm of
playing-card manufacturers. , . .
From time to time the narrative is interrupted by a little 'essay ; there is one on Wealth, another on -Paris, a third '(more relevant than either of the foregoing) on Monaco, and several on Gamblers and the refinements of Gambling. The 'essays are entertaining enough in themselves, but they some- what encumber M. Guitry's narrative which is too slight to support unnecessary burdens. The group of essays on .Gambling is particularly disastrous in this respect, for it forces on our attention that M. Guitry's story has behind it, what-Of all things it is least fitted to supports a practical aim-f-to justify the taste for Gambling. The hero tells us that while he was relying on skill and dishonestly winning he experienCed nothing like the rapture which came to him later when be had abandoned himself to chance and wash' process. of losing, and that now having tasted these delights he find-, himself incapable of cheating again: M. Guitry's imagination has collapsed under the burden of this commonplace moral, and the end of the book is tedious-and-banal. The fable sud- denly becomes- a pamphlet (written, it appears, in all serious- ness), and the requirements of fiction are .sacrificed to an extremely unconvincing sermon. It is cruel of M. Guitry thus to have tarred the wings of an otherwise personable butterfly. Dkinic VERSCIIOYLE.
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