DESPAIR IN THE SUN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 536, 30 September 1949, Page 16

DESPAIR IN THE SUN

THESE DARK GLASSES, by Greville Texidor; the Caxton Press, 6/6. HESE Dark Glasses is a tale of disillusionment set in the French Riviera, and from its pathological overtones it reads like the product of a sick mind. Yet it is written with such skill, and is so artfully contrived, that its literary merit cannot be ignored. On | the surface it is slick, sophisticated, and | clever, but basically it is deadly serious. The action, described in diary form, covers a period of nine days at Calanques, a holiday resort near Marseilles, in the late 1930’s. The characters-Com- | rade Ruth Brown, who writes for the | "Save Spain Committee," Gloria, the | nymphomaniac American, Soskia, the blonde in the off-white Bugatti, Julian the artist, Otto the blond Aryan, Howard the bourgeois Englishman, and others-attend wild parties in cafés and cliff-side cabarets, lie on the beach in the sun, and discuss (between drinks) their neuroses or "the state of the masses." The general tone of the book is one of acute pessimism. Ruth Brown, the narrator, has reached the ultimate stage of despair, an icy hysteria*in which she doesn’t care what happens to her or what she does. "It’s ghastly being bottled up with all these phoney people," she says; but she adds "I do not wish to leave. There is no future. Suicide plans are meaningless ...." She lives on the verge of a dream world in and out of which she passes almost imperceptibly and at will, in the midst of a nightmare of Freudian symbols. What is the cause of this state of mind? One reason appears on the first page-her friends Victor and Malcolm have been killed in the war in Spain. Her mental crisis is thrown into relief by the strange assortment of figures she meets at Calanques, all acidly sketched in with a few strokes, since the shortness of the narrative (only 81 pages) prevents any detailed development. Maladjusted, frustrated, many of them are avant garde intellectuals and eccentrics for. whom free love-and sexual abnormality have become almost a way of life. Ruth Brown’s story develops into a rejection of the ideals and attitudes they represent--their belief that Communism was the only cure for the world’s ills, that Spain was worth saving, even at the cost of one’s best friends, that Picasso was the last word:‘in art, and Freud, Marx and the Left Book Club the last thing in philosophy and litera--ture. Even their stock words and phrases -"bourgeois," "Freudian," "Trotskyite," "the toiling masses," "one of these up-to-the-minute Lefts"-are sarcastically played upon to appear as a worn and almost meaningless currency. "It’s too bad having to bother about the masses," says one character, but "Wasn’t it naive to trust the intellectuals? Toujours plus haut, toujours plus avant sur les cimes. It was only a clearing they led us across. Now they are disappearing into the fog." The significance of These Dark Glasses lies in the) author’s intuitive awareness of that fog, and of the futility of what seems to her to be the blind leading the blind. Technically the book is very well written, and the disciplined economy of

style and construction produces a tight thythmic pattern of an unusual yet aesthetically satisfying texture. The author was born in England and came to New Zealand in 1940. One or two short stories with a local background had revealed a considerable ability, but they had not prepared us for anything

quite like this.

P.J.

W.