Zola, Gide and Mauriac
The Art of French Fiction. By Martin Turnell. (Hamish Hamilton, 30s. net.) MR. TURNELL'S new book is a worthy and wel- come successor to his Novel in France. It is also in some respects a better and more, balanced book. We rarely get bogged down in anything boring, though we sometimes feel that the writing is rather repetitious. This is because Mr. Turnell has the habit of making a point, quoting (and translating) a passage to illustrate it and then repeating the point to clinch the matter. Then there is perhaps too much material from the critic's notebook. Mr. Turnell has discovered 'stylistics'—his new book is the most professional- looking he has yet produced, as the admirable bibliography bears witness, and this enables him to say things about the style of Zola, Mauriac and others which seem very sound. though only a. Frenchman could judge them. But it is a pity that these things were not more often condensed into a vividly phrased generalisation. One cannot wade through lists of words and at the same time keep up the easy reading tempo which the rest of the book permits. Finally, there is a certain sectarian bias, which reveals itself in the hostility to the Protestantism' of Andre Gide and the 'Jansenism' of Mauriac, and emerges at the end in a denunciation of Pascal as 'the poisoned source' of all that is evil in modern religion.
Mr. Turnell is a very honest critic; and he is pre- pared to change his mind. He has changed his mind about Prevost (the only eighteenth-century novelist dealt with), and, besides rediscovering Manor; Lescaut, has a tip to offer about some less-known works by the remarkable Abbe. 'He still holds, though rather defensively, to his exaggerated opinion of Stendhal, and gives us an interesting chapter on the early novel Arniance. Armance is an absurd production in many ways, but it has great psychological interest. It is one of those books which leave us with the feeling that some essential clue is being withheld from us, and Mr. Turnell explains plausibly what that is : explains how the hero's curiously feminine qualities affect the question of his impotence.
Here as elsewhere he very rightly draws on the best French criticism. But if much of his book can be called good middleman-work, he is a critic in his own right. This is especially clear in his amusing chapter on Maupassant, where, without getting up any moral steam-head, he brings out convincingly both Maupassant's very real artistic merits and his deplorable moral taste; he is, or course, concerned to make the points which Henry James and Tolstoy had already made, but he makes them in his own way.
Most of the book is devoted to substantial studies of Zola, Gide and Mauriac. Mr. Turnell has conceived a higher opinion of Zola, here agreeing with a current trend in French opinion. He stresses the poet-artist, rather than the 'social realist' in Zola, and brings out the remarkable pictorial and musical qualities of Zola's poetic imagination. The chapter on Gide, though thorough and carefully argued, is unfair, dis- torted by a polemical bias. His charges against Gide range from general accusations of psycho- pathic egotism and mendacity to specific crimes such as under-tipping a hotel porter. Gide asked for such attacks, of course, by being so insistently and embarrassingly autobiographical; his works need weeding-out; and, suffering the penalty, like Aldous Huxley, of always being so resolutely up to date, he has dated. But I can imagine a more balanced view of him than Mr. Turnell's. The chapter on Mauriac, on the other hand, though discriminating—he finds that Mauriac virtually said his say as an artist in his earlier novels—is by comparison indulgent. Mr. Turnell does full justice to Mauriac's terrible picture of bourgeois family life, while not neglecting to com- ment on the assertive and questionable diagnosis, the very odd 'positives,' which the dogmatist in Mauriac incorporates into it.
Mr. Turnell is at his best in the particular study of particular works, and his general remarks are more dubious. He is a thorough-going historicist, infer- ring the spirit of the age from the work of his authors and then using it as a 'background' to explain them. He talks as if the French seven- teenth-century writers invented the idea of love as a tragic niadness. But any reader of the Medea or the Hippolytus will know of that kind of love from which girls prayed to be delivered. Mr. Turnell's historicism can thus be too parochial. The great moral writers of the French tradition not only reveal, by what they say, their own national culture and historical period; they are concerned fundamentally with what Dr. Johnson called 'general nature.'
W. W. ROBSON
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