Parabola of Despair

ARCH OF TRIUMPH--Erich Mono Remarque--Appleton-Cenfury ($3).

"The mass of men," wrote Thoreau from the fir-scented tranquillity of Walden Pond, "lead lives of quiet desperation." In periods of accelerated history, the organic rot of Rome, the collapse of the Middle Ages, the gigantic life & death struggles of 20th-century civilization, this desperation takes on a new intensity. Its symbol in our time is the emigre, the political fugitive.

First came the White Russians, who as taxi drivers, doormen or waiters could not forget that they had once been gentlefolk. Next came the people who had laughed loudest at the White Russians, the fugitives from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Then in a swamping human surf came the fugitives from Spain. Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France. All of them bore, like a leper's bell, the one ineffaceable possession left them by their ordeal--the mood of quiet desperation, quiet, because its very existence threatened the peace of mind of those who still felt secure; quiet, because who can really convey an experience to one who has not suffered it before?

Down the Drain. The mood of Erich Maria Remarque's new novel (Book-of-the-Month Club choice for February) is quiet desperation. Most of its characters are emigres of polyglot nationalities. Its setting is Paris, the sink in which most of them have been stranded before being washed down the drain. The time is the eve of World War II.

In All Quiet on the Western Front, Author Remarque wrote the great popular novel about World War I. In it the dead of Europe's vast battle graveyards first found their voice. It was written with deep compassion and the sad but tough-fibered cynicism with which compassion deflects the battering blows of the world. Arch of Triumph is no All Quiet on the Western Front. The compassion is still there; the cynicism has deepened. The craftsmanship is expert.

Illegal & Unethical. Its chief character is a German doctor, living illegally in France. He calls himself Ravic, but that is only one of his assumed names. Once a famous surgeon, Ravic cannot practice in France (he has no license). He lives by substituting unethically at surgical operations for two French doctors, one too old and inept, the other not a surgeon. The patients never see Ravic, who is present only while they are under anesthetic.

Arch of Triumph is chiefly the love story of this sadly cynical surgeon and a bit of international flotsam named Joan Madou. It is also a story of the vicissitudes of the emigres and Ravic's murder of the Gestapo chief who had tortured him in Germany. The story of the emigres succeeds because of its tough, bold, unsentimental treatment of vast pathos. The story of Ravic's revenge succeeds because of Novelist Remarque's skill in presenting a cunning, brutal murder as an act of justice. The love story fails because Joan, an unpleasant character at best, is never quite real. When she is accidentally shot by her third or fourth lover, Ravic prepares to operate on her. Then he finds that the bullet has shattered a vertebra. No operation is possible. His skill, which has saved so many lives that mean little to him, can do nothing for Joan, who means much to him. Joan dies the day the Germans invade Poland, and the world, like a blob of soggy ice cream oozing off a spoon, slides into World War II.

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