BOOKS

The Little-ease

BY LAIN HAMILTON PrHERE are two books here from which the 1 rank smell of doom unmistakably rises. Both are from the French, both by cartographers of hell. One, de Beauvoir's new novel,* is immensely long, broad, and shallow, a delta spreading out across the intellectual landscape of postwar France. The other, a conte of sorts by Camus,t is short, narrow, and deep, a bottomless lake held in the fold of a dark moral declivity. They are the long 'and the short of self-deception, moral failure, intellectual disgrace, rootlessness, guilt, anguish, and despair; and each in its own way sufficiently demonstrates that such torments are neither so obsolete nor so uproariously funny as some of our own kitchen-comedians would have had us believe before the catastrophe of Hungary, and on a lesser scale that of Suez, reintroduced into our complacent air a whiff or two of sulphur.

'Why, this is hell,' says Marlowe's Mephis- topheles, 'nor am I out of it.' This is the text for Jean-Baptiste Clamence, whose monologue of thirty thousand words forms the entire substance of The Fall. He buttonholes the reader in a dock- side bar in Amsterdam called the 'Mexico City'; an ancient mariner of our day, he confesses at length in a tone of savage and defiant irony. The lucid prose flows on vigorously from page to page, depositing on the margins of memory its wrack of crisp and nasty epigrams.

'A single sentence will suffice for modern man : he fornicated and read the papers.'

But M. Clamence, who used to be a lawyer in Paris and is now what he calls a judge-penitent, does not lie in wait for newspaper-readers and fornicators merely to hand out bitter epigrams: this is a mere incidental of his main function— the demonstration of the nature of damnation. It is an unpleasant lesson, but not one easily for- gotten. He talks and talks, sitting opposite the reader in the 'Mexico City,' pulling him over the Wet cobbles, sailing with him over the vague and melancholy expanse of the Zuyder Zee, accom- panying him under the whorehouse windows. Once successful in his profession in Paris; neither too rich nor too poor; healthy; an accomplished lover of women; physically, morally, and intel- lectually comfortable; a self-assured realist at Peace with the world—now he fills his veins with alcohol in Amsterdam, dredging an ultimate bitterness out of the mud and setting forth his degradation to anyone who will listen.

'How beautiful the canals . . .' he says. 'I like • THE MANDARINS. By Simone de Beauvoir. Trans- lated by Leonard M. Friedman. (Collins, 18s.)

t THE FALL. By Albert Camus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. (Hamish Hamilton, 10s. 6d.)

the smell of stagnant waters, the smell of dead leaves soaking in the canal and the funereal scent rising from the barges loaded with flowers.'

Whajever the nature of the personal crisis which he cherishes like a cancer, he has still strength enough to strike with his claws at the outside world: 'For instance, you must have noticed that our old Europe at least philosophises in the right way. We no longer say as in simple times: "This is my opinion. What are your objections?" We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have sub- stituted the communiqué. "This is the truth," we say. "You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police to show you I'm right."' Certainly, however one may fidget from time to time in the role of wedding guest, the monologue holds the attention and disturbs the imagination. Clamence's 'essential discovery,' as he calls it, is revealed exactly half-way through the book. Crossing the Pont Royal one evening he passed a young woman leaning over the railing. Before he had gone fifty yards he heard a splash and a cry.

'I told myself that I had to be quick and I felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have for- gotten what I thought then. "Too late, too far ..." or something of the sort. I was still listening as I st&od motionless. Then, slowly, in the rain, I went away. I told no one.'

But this failure on the Pont Royal was not so much the cause of Clamence's disintegration as the agency through which it was accomplished by greater forces. His unrestrained self-conscious- ness was already leading him to see a double image in the looking-glass; the virtue was already draining out of the world around him; his extreme moral sensibility was already turning the casual intercourse of every day into a nightmare; he already felt the weight of the albatross about his neck. The catastrophe on the Pont Royal served to accelerate a natural process.

'The whole universe then began to laugh at me.'

The vanity of the world—or, as he puts it, 'the frivolity of seriousness'—comes like a blight over thought and emotion. At first he tries to content himself with playing a role, but this is useless— for modesty helps him to shine, humility to con- quer, virtue to oppress. And so he withdraws towards the lowest depths, judging himself relent- lessly, punishing himself with joyless debauchery, fitting himself into a spiritual version of the little- ease—the medieval cell which was neither high enough to stand up in nor wide enough to lie down in. Towards the close the monologue grows richer in texture; wilder and more anguished; more bitterly catastrophic and God-denying in tone—a howling in the swamp.

Thus we have our present and plentiful horrors canalised in depth by Camus, who takes his epi- graph from Lermontov: 'Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a model such an immoral character as A Hero of Our Time; others shrewdly noticed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquain- tances. . . . A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression.'

M. Camus has written a most valuable and disturbing book to remind us of a great deal that we should prefer to forget. It is profoundly moving in its delineation of the godless state in which men take it upon themselves to pronounce daily the Last Judgement—a handy little primer of hell recognised, accepted, and, in the utmost confusion and agony of spirit, endured.

To turn from this small volume, so meagre in pages but so rich in allusive content, to the mighty sprawl of The Mandarins is like putting down a glass of applejack and starting on a dozen gallons of the cider from which it is distilled. The com- parison is monstrously unfair, of course. One is not to blame Mlle de Beauvoir for writing a niost accomplished novel, one of the best since the war. All the same, it is dispiriting to begin with, all those cold pints on top of the fiery calvados. So much detailed lifting of glasses and skirts, so much taking out of cigarettes and down of trousers, coming and going and talking and telephoning and one damned bed after another. Still, the piling up of detail soon has the desired effect. Simple curiosity whips the reader through cafés, bedrooms, newspaper offices and boule- vards, and sustains him through the ideological expositions with which the author illumines the political and moral dilemmas of her characters.

These characters are fictitious, of course (as the customary disclaimer states), but many of them and many of the events in which they are involved have, presumably, an umbilical correspondence with the realities of intellectual life in Paris during the years immediately after the war. Mlle de Beauvoir also might well have taken Lermontov's note for epigraph, for there is a sense in which her book is complementary to that of Camus, copiously descriptive where his is curtly diag- nostic. It is not an attractive slice of life which she so deftly and honestly presents—an arid and sterile expanse in which her intellectuals, moving in a vacuum and separated one from the other by limitless spaces of the spirit, stave off their despair by whistling in tune with the Communists. One can see why : for theirs is a world of abstractions, one in which simple human affection scarcely exists, in which children are not conceived, in which politics is naively played at by influential people who all too easily play into the hands of those for whom politics is not a game of chess. Still, although the novel is in great part a record of disenchantment, all is not hopelessness. There is a hasty reconciliation with real life in the last few chapters. Amor ontnia vincit. A child is con- ceived. Life goes on, says this accomplished author and eminent existentialist. Which, in the circumstances, is a more exciting moral than one might suppose.