End of a Family

SUMMER 1914--Roger Martin du Gard-- Viking ($3.50).

The world of letters blinked a little in 1937 when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Roger Martin du Gard. His long novel, Les Thibault, was little known outside France; he was something of a recluse who saw what he wanted to see of the world through a peephole, and who wrote from a photostatic recollection of his own top-drawer bourgeois life before and during World War I. When, after the award was announced, a reporter tried to stop the scurrying prizewinner for questions, Martin du Card refused to talk. The reporter asked why. For the same reason, explained the author, that he would not let his four-year-old grandson watch him take a bath.

Martin du Card had a home in Normandy when the Germans broke into France last year. With his wife, who had a broken arm and shoulder in a plaster cast, he fled to the south of France, where he still is. The Nazis thoroughly messed up the Normandy house, but Stuart Gilbert, who was translating the last of Les Thibault into English, managed to slip out with his manuscript. Published this week as Summer 1914, it brings the novel to a close (1,800-odd pages in all) and also finishes off the Thibaults as a family.

The mark of the Thibaults is a strong, blocky jaw and a flair for dominance. At first there are three--Jacques, his older brother Antoine, their widowed father. Father Oscar is a pious, pompous, severe, uncomprehending and walled-in old man who hides in his heart a mortal fear of death, who snatches at straws of immortality by devoting himself to good works. Jacques is a rebellious, brooding, high-strung adolescent, destined to seek feverishly the meaning of his own life. Antoine is an egoistic, hard-minded doctor, devoted to his work and proud of being a man of action. Theirs and a half-dozen other lives wind around one another like raw nerves, in alternating anguish, ecstasy, dullness, peace.

When Summer 1914 opens, M. Thibault, racked by spasms of pain and terror, has died of convulsive uremia--a deathbed scene which Martin du Gard writes with the clean brutality of a clinical treatise. Jacques, matured and forceful, is a respected leader in a colony of revolutionists in Switzerland. He has decided that what he wants is a part in a revolutionary world change, but his soul is still troubled. He has a consuming pity for the mass of men, a great contempt for their rulers, but he lacks a blind faith in revolutionary slogans and formulas, and worse, he distrusts human nature, including that of revolutionists. "A man," he feels, "who is capable of ... brutal, bloodthirsty acts, and of calling them 'acts of justice,' such a man, when the battle's won, will never regain his decency. . . ."

Nevertheless, he joins an underground campaign of socialists all over Europe to prevent war. Dismayed at the sight of socialist spokesmen backsliding into patriotism, he hopes to the last for a miracle, a general strike--something. But the war begins and he loses his life in a last, wild, hallucinatory attempt to stop it. Then Author Martin du Gard hurdles clear over the war to 1918, when Antoine, mustard-gassed in medical service and dying of abscessed lungs, lives just long enough to see the Armistice.

In 1937 when Martin du Card's award was announced, the question arose why--if the Nobel committee wanted to pick a long, social French novel--it did not crown Jules Remains' longer, as yet unfinished Men of Good Will. The question is still valid. Both works cover the same period, both are fraught with the desire of idealists to stop the war, both are written with objectivity approaching self-effacement. The general impression left by Men of Good Will is rich, vascular, forthright; of Les Thibault nervous, sinewy, tangled. Men of Good Will chronicles a whole society, Les Thibault a family and its immediate connections. Romains cut into French life at scores of levels, pulled out hundreds of characters. They are alive, but they are polished as flawlessly as marble. Some are almost too pat to his purpose.

Martin du Card's people have the puzzling surfaces of real people whom he has studied closely but not entirely understood. At times their motivations stretch thin to the vanishing point, and their behavior seems perverse and arbitrary. But in some ways they are even more alive than Remains' people. Doubtless Remains' book is a greater work of art; but Les Thibault may be the better novel.

Alfred Rosenberg last fortnight opened in Frankfurt am Main what Nazis call "the biggest library in the world dealing exclusively with the Jewish problem." Contents: 350,000 volumes.

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