New Novels
Battle Cry. By Leon Uris. (Wingate. 12s. 6d.) WAR in the three tenses, past, present, future, is the theme of this week's books. Most straightforward of them is Battle Cry. It has all the faults of the fat American war novel with the black type and the blue words and the purple flashbacks, and none of its virtues. It is an excellent example of what a book about war need not and should not be. The main narrator is a sentimental old-time Marine sergeant, with swear words on his lips and a choke in his throat. who describes the development of a mixed bag of raw young cliche, into one big solid cliché. And they are all there ready for the casting director : the tough, golden-hearted major, the cowardly lieutenant, the Jew who has to prove himself, the dumb Swede, the half-pint, the All-American boy, the Professor. They are trained, they love and are betrayed by the usual women, they kill and are killed ; and never at a level of reality closer than the panoramic screen. The over dramatisation of every gesture, the inflation of every speech, the tight-lippedness of every horror, produce not a cathartic but an emetic effect. The experience through which Mr. Uris has passed is real enough ; but he is totally incapable of communicating it except in Hollywood half-truths and heroisms ; more, by debasing it, he inevitably cheapens the remembrance of the experience shared by other people. This is the writer's sin against the Holy Ghost. The war in the Pacific is also the scene of The Goodly Seed, but Mr. Wyllie, thank Heavens, has not been fixated by Brian DonlevY• He writes about Christmas in a Japanese prisoner-of-war callaP. The camp commandant, an elderly Englishman, is dying of beri-beri ; over him is waged the continuing struggle for survival and a new struggle for succession. Suffering has eroded the surfaces of the characters who are grouped around the central plateau of his bedside, and they are shown in the jagged purity and harshness of their basic structure. Mr. Wyllie draws men, not types. Moreover, here the Japanese are human beings, fanatical, weak, sadistic, anxious, some- times kind—people, not monkeys on sticks. The quality of Mr. Wyllie's experience, the savagery of his need to survive, the darkness of his fear of death, are the same as Mr. Uris's. But Mr. Wyllie is an artist, where Mr. Uris is a cub reporter. He has transmuted his experience internally, organised it, in recollection, into a whole. From the interdependence of the characters on each other's strengths and weaknesses, the breaking down of superficial prejudices in the face of the need to share suffering, arises a balanced and adult view of the small prison community. The beatings, the physical details of suffering, the sores and the sickness, are not introduced just to give the structure toughness ; they are an integral part. Nor is Mr. Wyllie's message an after-thought ; it is implicit in the development of his characters.
I've had great fun with Lanny Budd in the past : I've enjoyed his cloak-and-dagger chats with Hitler and Goering and Stalin ; his earnest, wide-eyed conversations about the necessity for socialism and Americanism and pacifism, as well as the charmingly naive asides about culture and such with which Mr. Sinclair has always sprinkled this best-selling series. I turned, therefore, to the eleventh volume hoping to find some cheerfully black-and-white, schoolmasterish explanation of what was going on around me. Lanni was already having a cosy talk to Mr. Truman by page 23 about how difficult things were, and 1 thought all was well. But after a while I realised it wasn't. The thing is : Lanny Budd doesn't know what to do any more. The old Hentyish liberal-humanist hero is on the slide. Faced with Communism he talks. In the old days he'd have been in the Kremlin by page 150 and back with the plans of the flying saucer and telling Roosevelt what to do about Tito before you could • say dialectical materialism. But these days Lanny just talks. Mr. Sinclair is, in fact, damnably worried (and-aren't we all ?) about more or less everything. • He knew we were going to win that other, more straightforward war of long ago. This one he's not so sure about. And so the snap's gone, the clear right-and-wrongness is over, the chats with the great are ended. The Return of Lanny Budd is worth looking at for this reason. It's the problem called The Plight of The American Liberal. Bess, Lanny's sister, who married that nice German-Jewish violinist (you remember ?) is now a Red having trouble with the F.B.I. Sure, there's some torture and a currency ring to bust. But, by and large, Lanny's lost his grip. The book ends with a peroration with all the American names from Thomas Jefferson,upwards and onwards thrown in to stop the flood ; but it's a despairing peroration. The certainty of everything being right in the end that made Mr. Sinclair's personalised History of Our Times for Fairly Intelligent Children so warming and so readable, has vanished. And there is nothing left at all except words.
It's Romain Gary of Paris, France (a country of whose moral fibre Lanny is pretty uncertain), who comes up with an answer. The Colours, of the Day is a remarkable book. I haven't read M. Gary's first two novels, but I shan't miss any more. Witty,- bitter, tender, The Colours of the Day tells the story of the meeting of Rainier, just about to leave for Indo-China (as in the thirties he left for Spain, in the forties for Britain) with Ann, the film-star wife of Willie Bauch6, an ageing boy-genius of the cinema. Love explodes goldenly between the two, to the accompaniment of Nice's Battle of Flowers, Willie's megalomania, his father-in-law's negation, the fiery Sancho Panza ramblings of La Marne-Bedbern—Rainier's comrade in lost causes—the creeping menace of gunmen hired by Willie ; and always, always, the greater horror of the crawling clock. M. Gary has written a novel of ideas which is also a superb chronicle of love. It is an extraordinarily sustained piece of writing that crackles with fireworks, flares with blossom, grinds with pain. Faults there certainly are : at times the talk is for the sake of talking only, the allusions for the sake of being allusive. But this is a French fault I'll accept ; because at its most discursive it's still good talk. The second fault is one of control : the author has clearly over identified himself with Rainier whose too-often-described charm and virility become irritating. Thirdly, the hard core of common- sense and worldliness which is fundamental to the people of the Mediterranean is exchanged for an English Francophile Bless 'Em All approach in passages like : " She put her *cheek against Rainier's and her arms around him. And the passengers were happy and smelled of garlic, gloriously. Rainier kissed her lips, and the conductor waited patiently to give them their tickets but since there was no end to the kiss he went away and left them, to the approval of everyone. And the bus bumped and bounced, and the air was full of the smell of garlic."
Which surprises me. These three faults apart, the book is excellent. It excites, amuses, stimulates, stirs. And Rainier expresses at length —and in his actions as well as his words—the eternal conflict between personal happiness and duty (M. Lovelace's remarks to Mlle Lucasta are its text). There is the further problem too of an understanding, any understanding between the American and the Frenchman. As yet, M. Gary is incapable of this, I feel. Neverthe- less, because there is an overt hostility between the world of Willie and the world of old man Garantier—Ann's father—the lack of understanding, indeed the violent hopelessness of the possibilities of mutual acceptance, is pinpointed. And this is the way—this way and not Mr. Sinclair's- Voice of America, Crime Doesn't Pay, Lincolnian way—that ultimately the two Cultures may come together. General Gruenther would not be very happy about Rainier's point of view, about his reasons for fighting. The emperors of initials, the kings of EDC and NATO, need something more positive than humility to sustain them : " All I can do is to defend a world, a way of life that respects my contradictions, my approximations, my doubts, my uncertain and changing truths and my fraternal errors. There is around us, between truth and error, a merciful margin of relativity which will always save us from both our errors and our truths. .
" Our littleness will let us escape all the calculations ; man is something no law can capture or contain.
" I believe in our weakness. How could I not believe in weakness, I, who love a woman ?
" I have only to touch your breast, my love, to know what is human and what is not.
" Progress is a right to weakness, painfully won, painfully preserved.
" But you can be weak only among those who believe in weakness and respect it.
" And for the time being, waiting for man to prevail, I must accept the defeat which is to be strong. I must leave you and set myself to face those who believe in steel and strength. I must leave you and wait patiently until they become like us—until they succeed —until they become weak."
Wars and the rumours of wars—how can writers escape? My genera- tion has never known an afternoon—even when the clouds were at their highest and the roses at their gentlest—when the deaths of the past and the deaths of the future were not alive. This is the European problem which is Europe's strength (if General Gruenther will under- stand it) and Europe's weakness. As Rainier says : " I've never been a Communist, God knows. But my generation fought so often on the same side with them that we can no longer forgive them anything."
Writers like Mr. Wyllie and M. Gary are a part of our present ; and for their ability to make us understand why our friends died, and why they are dying now, and will die—unheroic, unmanned, but hopeful, always hopeful—well, thank God.
JOHN METCALF
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