MEMOIRS AND COMMENTARY

Press, Volume C, Issue 29506, 6 May 1961, Page 3

MEMOIRS AND COMMENTARY

Memoires Interieurs. By Francois Mauriac. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 242 pp. Index. For The Time Being. By Vercors. Hutchinson. 181 PP- | Here are two volumes of memoirs and commentary, by i two distinguished French ! authors. The “Memoires ! Interieurs” of Mauriac is perI sonal, with a lyrical quality that the translator. Gerard I Hopkins, has somehow preserved. Vercors, on the other i hand, writes of politics; he is supremely concerned for -the future of France, and inevitably he writes in a somewhat partisan spirit. Francois Mauriac's book proves how right PierreHenri Simon was. when he remarked that this writer's personality had quite early become far too important to i be expressed in works of i fiction alone. Hence the i many volumes of plays, journals and miscellaneous works j that must be added to his long list of novels. ! The “Memoires Interieurs” | comes from the pen of a | man in his seventies, a man who never for a moment forgets his age and what it must imply. Wisdom and dignity radiate from these pages." The theme is literature but those wonderful old volumes, pondered in youth, appear in a haze of memories and associations. A single phrase may lead back to recollections of the family vineyard at Malagar, of his mother putting before him the spiritual problem that authorship seemed to pose. A few lines of quotation may perhaps give something of the atmosphere that pervades this book. “As summer moved towards its end, a sadness came to me mingled with the love I felt for the park and the ' heath which I hedged it in behind innum- ! erable pines. My love for I all that arid, gloomy country--side grew ever fiercer, as it ! began to take on the look which it would wear on the ’October morning when, between us two, the last ! word would have to be I said. That would be a moment of heartrending beauty: the coming of the first wood-pigeons, the cowbells sounding in the mist, a I wind from the west smelling -of the sea.” Every page is illuminated by this effortless ! eloquence. ! Of course, the literary (judgments are personal ones; Mauriac does not aim at I formal or systematic criticism here. What he has to : say, however, is often the -result of penetrating insight. For instance, “What we read is not a matter of chance, j All my living springs com- | municate: Pascal, Racine, ! Gide. The centuries have nothing to do with it. Deep down, the sheet of subteriranean water is the same.” What is more difficult an opinion may also be illustrated. “Reading (Henry James’s) ‘The Bostonians’ ’has ted me. once again, to wonder whether Freud can be said to have enriched the novel as a literary form. Do the books which were written and published before the coming of the Freudian cult, -and before Proust's ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ really seem so sketchy and superficial compared with later productions in which sexuality reigns supreme and every variant of love can be called bv its name without a blush?” And again, “a novel can express anything and everything, and can achieve, as does ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ (the remarkable triumph of turning a cruel caricature of Christianity into an apologia which opens a door upon the mystery of evil.” As for Vercors’s book, the title, “For the Time Being,” is indeed apt It has been written in the midst of the combat of the Right with the

Left. Vercors himself avows “This is not a book, it is a file.” In another place he writes, “For I must admit I can no longer be serene.” Nevertheless the central position from which Vercors argues seems to be best given in his own words on page 83 of “For the Time Being.” The passage reads. “It is now time to try and think honestly. No armed intervention is justified, and we have declared this plainly. The ruins of Budapest matter as much of those of Port Said, the dead at Budapest matter as much as those in Madagascar, the tears of Budapest as much as those of Cyprus or Guatemala. The Red Army, when it crushed the Hungarian workers under the fire power of its tanks, fought for the first time against the liberation of a people, and in doing so it has lost its innocence in the eyes of millions of men. The disappointment has caused violent anger in many of us, and rightly. But this anger, this disarray, is now in danger of carrying us too far.” It is the spirit of reconciliation for which Vercors still stands, and for which he has always stood, as readers of “The Silence of the Sea” will, no doubt, remember. In these bitter days, Vercors may go away empty handed; but this book proves that he will not go away empty hearted. To turn from the general to the particular, an interesting reference occurs on page 171 of “For the Time Being.” Speaking of the foundation of the FrancoChinese Friendship Society, Vercors says. “It gives me pleasure to mention an exemplary man here tonight. His name is Rewi Alley. He landed one day at Shanghai, I think, coming from New Zealand. A week later, horror at the condition of the Chinese had so overwhelmed him that he thought: ‘There is no middle way: either I must escape by the first boat, or else stay with these wretched people and try to help them’.” It will be seen that Vercors makes a wide cast with his net.