Five British and French novels reviewed

The Girls: A Tetralogy By Henry de Montherlant; translated by Terence Kilmartin Harper, $8.95 Bruno’s Dream By Iris Murdoch Viking, $5.75 Consider the Lilies By Auberon Waugh Little, Brown, $4.95 Savage Sleep By Millen Brand Crown, $6.75 The Other Side of the Mountain By Michel Bernanos; translated by Elaine Halperin Houghton, $4.95 Once, on the island of Corcyra, I watched a tableau which my Puritan mind, trained to see signs and portents everywhere, recognized instantly as 4 sight to be treasured and pondered. A ship from some miserable Communist country was anchored at the dock and its passengers, who could not disembark, were being treated to a round dance of Greek maidens in those national costumes which are about as prevalent in Greece as wooden shoes in Amsterdam. The comely maidens thus _ twirling were strictly Tourist Bureau shills, and no doubt all aspired to get to Cincinnati as soon as possible. On the dock road by the old Venetian fort I could see a real Greek woman. She wore a black scarf, many black sweaters and many black skirts. In one hand she carried a drawing board, in the other a T-square. Real people are always a surprise. But are women real people? They live in a dream, says Monsieur de Montherlant, and their contact with reality is wholly hysterical. Their heads, says Miss Murdoch, can be turned by a featherweight of attention. They are dull, says Mr. Waugh, and irretrievably stupid. Mr. Brand says that they are _ Tarely allowed to grow up, remaining infantile, puling, and demanding all their days. Monsieur Bernanos does not mention them. These disparagements are prehistoric and perennial; there are no absolutes, only opposites which define each other. _ When Henry de Montherlant published the first two volumes of his anguished tetralogy about the plight of women (Les jeunes filles and Pitié pour les _ femmes, both 1936), woman was about halfway between her Victorian bondage and her present full measure of uhuru. Le Démon du bien followed in 1937, and Les Lépreuses in 1939. There was an English translation in 1948 to which no one paid much attention; de Montherlant, like the gustation of snails and telephones with two receivers, is too French for export. Americans are always shocked by the terrifying stinginess of the French, that rage for pettiness and selfishness at the core of French being. De Montherlant is the very essence of that stinginess in these novels. Under the guise of studying the silly Romanticism of French women, he is really laying bare the awful strain of femaleness in the French male. His hero is a kind of Don Juan, a novelist who is widely read and therefore the target of lonely women who pester him with love letters and well-designed visits. He rebuffs them, leads them on, crushes them with silence, and drives most of them to idiocy. But it is for de Montherlant’s commentaries that one reads him; he is a philosopher of the old school, acidly wise and fiercely disillusioned. Not until he has torn his readers’ illusions about romantic love to confetti does he offer a positive criticism of his characters. One wonders if the harpy Simone de Beauvoir, who does a devil dance around de Montherlant in The Second Sex, ever read this far. Behind his strenuous misogyny (equalled only by Byron’s), is a thoroughly plausible case. It is such a finely thought-out case that I despair of summarizing it here, and send you to this remarkable, unsettling book. In short, M. de Montherlant pro- — poses that we cure womankind of its systematic frivolity by destroying ro_mantic love root and branch, thereby — returning woman to humanity, a human being in her right mind. Just what Iris Murdoch’s twelfth novel is all about she has gone to great lengths to hide. From Samuel Beckett. she has taken a bed-ridden old man named Bruno whose hobbies are spiders and stamps. Around him gyrate characters from earlier Murdoch opera, — people locked up in their own obsessions. The action is brisk and delightful. This one marries that one in the end, and the most we can say is that the elusive Miss Murdoch has written a romantic comedy. In a recent interview with the late W. K. Rose, Miss Murdoch said that she had had a revelation about the novel; it is always a comic form, she said, and its subject is love. “I was once a kind of existentialist and now I am a kind of platonist.” In a scene in this new novel we are allowed to see a husband and wife having a spat. The sentences they fling at each other are quotations from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. There is a duelling scene lifted from War and Peace. Miss Murdoch’s Pre-Raphaelite sense of color and plastic clarity are as fine as ever. She is _ like an Arnold Bennett who has been to school to the Italian surrealists. How ‘so lucid a novel will not resolve into any meaning one can think of is frustrating for the reader, but then that may be the meaning. Auberon Waugh’s fourth satire is his best to date. The wonderfully disturb_ ing thing about the Waughs pere et fils is that their view of the world has always been eerily realistic. Like their master Ben Jonson they do not invent ‘their absurdities; they find them. In Consider the Lilies we have the clergy of the Church of England on parade, and every giggle and harumph is perfectly true to life. If the Victorian clergy with which Trollope had so much fun had a strange relation with the self-congratulatory, competent English whose spiritual adviser it was supposed to be, the relationship between Welfare England and its clergy is stranger still. The congregations are the world’s smallest; religion is the last thing to be expected from the parson’s mouth. Mr. Waugh’s comedy finds most of its hilariousness in the desperate obsolescence of super-liberal ideas. Religion has become sociology, sex has become hygiene, life has become boredom. Mr. _ Waugh’s testiness snaps in every line. He gives his brightly colored cardboard characters their every due, creating the delightful impression that Mr. Waugh is dispassionately recording all this idiocy out of an inexplicable sense of duty, and that there is nothing whatever that can be done about it short of _ divine intervention. The difference between the comic and the serious novel is simply a matter of how long a tether the artist attaches to his understanding of the human condition. The fun of Mr. Waugh is that his tether is ridiculously short. A tether – ridiculously long runs into other trouble, so that one can’t decide whether Millen Brand’s long novel about mental illness is a wondrously understanding and wise novel or whether it is a very loud melodrama. It is certainly a strange and unfamiliar work. It tells the story of a dedicated young pathologist who takes up psychiatry back in the Depression. He is a classic Freudoy 132 NATIONAL REVIEW ian and therefore anathema to the officials of madhouses, who have their own way of treating mental illness. The heart of the story is in the treatment of psychosis (or certifiable insanity); it had already been granted that neurosis (which all of us contend with daily) could be treated by Freudian methods. Our hero sets out rather blindly to treat terminal catatonic excitement with sheer love and understanding, rather than with electric shock (which is rather like treating a sore toe by pounding on the other nine with a hammer) or insulin injections (which is like trying to revive a drowned man by dashing buckets of water in his face). He has instant success, and is fired from the hospital for it. He keeps up his treatments furtively, and eventually branches out on his own. The second half of this long novel is concerned with his reaching, in her utterly closed-off mind, a young woman who neither speaks, hears, feels, nor performs bodily functions except by medical treatment. Thus the novel becomes something of a suspense story. It holds the attention and, if it is sound medically, teaches a lot about the nature of insanity and its treatment. The author (who was one of the writers of The Snake Pit, Hollywood’s first realistic tangle with psychosis) seems to know his subject thoroughly. One might have wished for a less lugubrious hero; I have a feeling that in real life one would flinch from his Herculean sanity and quail before his resolve to understand you or die in the attempt. Michel Bernanos was the son of the distinguished French writer Georges Bernanos. He did not write under his own name and was not serious about literary work until this novel, which he had completed at the time of his death four years ago. What he has written is a masterpiece. It is one of those unclassifiable stories which, like certain works of Poe and W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, remain inviolably unique. Whether it is a parable or allegory or simple tale of preternatural strangeness, it flows into the mind and stays there. The story is set in no recognizable place, and is perhaps outside of time. A man and a boy, shipwrecked, go into a forest, and what happens to them there I leave you to find out. But I can assure you that the imagination that makes the story so wonderful is very rare.