Salsette Forgets Europe
Salsette Discovers America. By Jules Romains. Translated from the French with an Introduction by Lewis Galantiere. (Hutchinson. 75. 6d.)
"THE reader will open Salsette in the expectancy that it is a book about America and not be disappointed • but he will discover when he is through that he has read a book about a man." So Mr. Lewis Galantiere justifies the literary device used by M. Romains to give a new slant to a rather banal approach to America. It is a literary device that so skilled a craftsman as M. Romains ought to have been able to use to great advantage. Yet the puppet hardly ever has the semblance of life and what life it manifests does not evoke, in one reader at least, any warm liking or admiration. This bachelor professor, escaping from the France of 1941 to the peace, the safety, the honours and emoluments of America, the chunky little man wjth, to judge from the jacket, something of the back view of M. Herriot, is he qualified, morally or intellectually, to be a good witness to the life of America from the point of view of mere information or from a deeper perception? It does not seem likely. Like M. Bergeret, M. Salsette was a professor in a French provincial univer- sity. Like M. Bergeret he was enlightened. Unlike M. Bergeret he was a bachelor. But whereas we know that M. Bergeret was a Latinist, we never discover what M. Salsette taught or studied at all. Since he ends up in what we may call a " cushy " job in the French department of a college that seems to be Wesleyan Univer- sity, we might assume that his subject was French. But he is also described as a man of science (though that may mean no more than erudit) and he apparently lays claim to have possessed what is, for a Frenchman, one of the rarest of accomplishments, the ability to write Greek verse. But all in all, Salsette, before he comes to America, remains a vague enough figure.
In America he remains rather vague, but such detail as we get to fill in the faint outline does not make him either interesting os impressive. M. Salsette (the time covered is from April to July of 1941, from the end of the Greek to the beginning of the Russian campaign) left France for America because there was nothing to be done. He expresses occasional regrets for the present state of France and despairs, in a banal enough fashion, over the state and prospects of European civilisation. He understands the reluctance of America to contemplate entering the war, but is a little distressed that so many Americans should judge France severely. It never seems to occur to him, or to M. Romains, or to the translator, or to the publisher, that if France is mainly represented in America by Salsettes, the Americans are right to judge her severely and to reduce their interest in her to her admitted pre-eminence in cooking, wines and ramour. There is not a line in the book to suggest that the war for the liberation and the salvation of France was being fought, that many Frenchmen were taking part in it, some of them of far more original and interesting intellectual character than M. Salsette seems to be. Why should the Americans, noting this blind admiration for America's ease of life and happiness, this acceptance of the advantages of American power with no apparent sense of any political responsibility to America, France or Europe, why should they not write off France as ended? So might Italians of the fifteenth century have written off Byzantium, after a meeting with a scholar who thought all was saved with his person and a few Greek manuscripts. So might Romans have regarded the occasional peevishness of a Greek sophist who, in the days of the Caesars, talked, from time to time, as if he was a contemporary of Miltiades or Pericles. If we are Puzzled, and we should be puzzled, at the ignoring in America of certain terrible truths about Europe, at a kind of general, genial toleration of all European divisions and doctrines as having much the same claim on their attention, the Salsettes, with whom America is too well provided, have a good deal to do with it. M. Romains is not a mere Salsette, but that he pro- duced this parody of his own role is also proof of ;he dangers of the too remote exile. As for what Salsette has to say about America, it could have been put in a shortish article for the National Geographic Magazine.
D. W. BROGAN.
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