The Saturday
Review of Literature
A
SPREADING PLANT
THE COUNTERFEITERS. By ANDRÉ GIDE. Translated
by Dorothy Bussy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1927.
In the journal
which he kept during the composition of his immense novel André Gide
has revealed the germ from which the entire book sprang. In the beginning
there were two newspaper clippings.
The first told of the arrest of a band engaged in passing counterfeit
coins. The youth of the members and the extraordinary code revealed
in their confession made the affair unusual. The second was a simple
but terrible story of suicide. Driven to the act by his schoolmates,
a young student blew out his brains in the midst of a class. Details
show the horrible sang froid and planned cruelty of his comrades.
On those bits of juvenile abnormality Gide has built up, with rare firmness
of touch and inventive ingenuity, a complicated narrative framework.
The process is laid bare in his journal. The result is The Counterfeiters.
Unlike his
earlier stories, which he now refuses to dignify with the name of novels,
The Counterfeiters is far from stylized , simplified, and reduced
for the expression of a single principle. He has been careful to make
its form such that all traces of the modern psychological novel shall
disappear. Yet it is not realistic, nor does it offer us a cross-section
of any particular milieu. He has, instead, attempted to dispense
with all the unessentials, to fall back on the old idea of the "pure"
novel. From his two clippings an immense plant of the imagination has
grown, so luxuriant, and often so exotic that any summary of it must
necessarily be both inadequate and misleading. The book is a sort of
demonstration of strength on the novelist's part, a kind of proof that
material, a thesis, documentation, psychological correctness, and all
the other shibboleths of whatever school are unimportant. What matters
(he appears to claim and demonstrate) is the way in which the narrator
illuminates his subject, whatever it may be. His knowledge of existence
and his ability to set down that knowledge clearly is all that distinguishes
even the greatest novelist from the teller of tales without meaning.
The
demonstration is almost gratifyingly successful. The fabric
of the novel is intricately woven, and at times extremely curious to
Anglo-Saxon eyes. Against a background barely indicated, but at moments
diabolic and unreal, he presents a series of interlocking episodes,
each leading to another, continuing yet renewing the narrative without
any slackening of interest. The principal figures are Bernard Profitendieu,
his friend Olivier Molinier, and Olivier's uncle, Edouard. Finding that
he is not the son of the man he has always supposed to be his father,
Bernard leaves his home, confiding only to Olivier. When Olivier goes
to meet his uncle at a railway station on the following day, Bernard
follows him and picks up the check which Edouard has dropped after leaving
his valise in the parcel room. Instead of returning check or luggage
to Edouard, Bernard claims the valise, opens it, and finds in it Edouard's
journal, from which he learns that Olivier’s elder brother, Vincent,
has become involved in an affair with a married woman, Laura Douviers,
who is expecting a child by him. He has lost at roulette the money intended
to aid her during the confinement. It is to help Laura, with whom he
had once fancied himself in love, that Edouard has returned to France.
In a state of romantic frenzy, Bernard rushes off to Laura's hotel,
where Edouard turns up in time to catch the thief of his luggage, pardon
him, and arrange to take him to Switzerland with Laura, as secretary.
There Bernard conceives a passion for Laura, while Edouard talks at
length of the novel he hopes to write — a novel to be called The
Counterfeiters, They meet a Polish boy, Boris, who is recovering
from a nervous disease at their sanitarium, and he returns to Paris
with them to enter the pension school kept by Laura's father, Meanwhile
Olivier has been introduced by Vincent to Count Robert de Passavant,
a brilliant and perverted young writer. Vincent, has been helped by
this personage both financially and in his love affair with Lady Griffith,
a typical "femme fatale". He now makes Olivier editor of a
magazine he is financing, and takes him to Corsica for the summer. At
the pension Bernard is thrown rather unwillingly into the arms of Sarah
Vedel, a daughter of the house. All. these persons come together at
a dinner given by Passavant's review, at which Olivier confesses his
disgust for his patron to Edouard, who persuades him to give up the
editorship. Bernard returns soon after to his home, much chastened,
and Laura goes back to her husband. The book ends with the two episodes
founded directly on the clippings — the counterfeiting affair in which
Olivier's younger brother is concerned, and the suicide of Boris.
The
character of the book is not always pleasant. The preoccupation with
sexual perversion which Gide has shown lately (Corydon and Si le
Grain ne meurt) is here exemplified in the relationship of
Passavant and Olivier, and in a more sentimental manner in the affection
of Edouard for Olivier. There are traces, too, in the valise incident
of an earlier attitude which may seem curious to those unfamiliar with
Gide's other books. Indeed, Bernard was originally named Lafcadio, and
was to have been the hero of les Les Caves du Vatican
in a later stage of development. It will be remembered that
the delightful young man pushed a fellow traveler out of the window
of his railway carriage simply because it occurred to him that there
could be no possible motive for doing so. The influence of Dostoievsky,
to whom Gide has devoted one of his best critical works, is doubtless
responsible for these peculiarities of conduct on the part of his heroes.
But matters
of derivation and significance aside, what a miraculous growth is this
novel of many novels! For from the initial situation spring new situations,
the original characters engender new ones, until there is not one, but
a whole series of novels within the book. One feels that Gide has stopped
this endless multiplication by a sheer effort of will and not because
his imagination is in any way taxed. He is sophisticated without ceasing
to be profound and he is profound without dullness. The task of writing
a novel that is modern in the worthiest sense and yet still as clearly
a novel as Tom Jones has been superbly performed. His tact and
skill in construction, the classic quality of his style (for even his
enemies will admit that Gide writes French as no one else can at present
time), and the continued intelligence of his observation, combine to
make The Counterfeiters rich beyond all but the best
of twentieth century fiction. Yet it can be read with pleasure for the
"story" alone. Perhaps Gide's real triumph is this manifestation
of the universal beneath a glittering surface of the particular. More
than a happy instinct for expressing emotions, more than the tricks
of the trade, have been necessary to achieve this subterranean wealth.
Andre
Gide's reputation in America has so far been of the most deadly sort.
Four of his books have been translated; his name is known and will even
produce a certain effect if injected abruptly into a literary conversation;
but it may be doubted that any save the few whose business it is to
read him have really bothered to do so. Now that France and Barrès and
Proust are gone there is no one whose word carries greater weight in
the province of French prose. He is not a "difficult" writer
- not, for example, half so difficult as Proust. His work is sufficiently
varied to afford for almost any reader the discovery of some good thing. |
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