88
PARTISAN REVIEW
to fulfill her prophecy that he would become first a murderer and then
a saint; and after tearing out an old Jew's beard following a pogrom, he
does become a pious-yearning beggar and dies what is presumably intended
to be an edifying death, thus bringing the "legend" to a close.
Herr Wedel, for his part, has provided the Book of the Month Club
with an ideal Xmas trade volume of more than 800 pages, with all the
impressive accoutrements in the way of maps, glossaries, etc. And into
those 800 plus pages he has packed plenty of excitement, romance, ad·
venture, along with several bits and passages that would do credit to a
William Seabrook. It is true, he has chosen a big theme, the attempted
annihilation, in the guise of transplantation, of the entire Armenian people
by the Turks under cover of the War, and the heroic stand made by a
handful of Armenians on the summit of Musa Dagh. It is a theme out
of which a master of socialist realism would have shaped a masterpiece
for all time. As it is, Herr W erfel has produced-an excellent Book of
the Month Club selection.
If
this is so, it is due to the fact that he has
not had the courage to let realism suffice, but must introduce stale old
romantic love-elements and similar trappings, pages of the merely pictu·
resque, whimsical and humorous touches that are out of key, etc.; but
most of all, it is due to the false thinking behind the book, the kind of
thinking that might be expected of one who "conceives tragedy as the.
basis of life"-which is not, after all, at such a far remove from
the
"eschatological pathos" of a Gottfried Benn. The suicidal murder of the
hero at the end, after he has saved the remnants of the colony, utterly
unmotivated as it is save by a false romanticism, is a good index to the
character of the novel.
Franz Wedel's thinking, so nearly as one can make it out, is to
the
effect that, while a bad nationalism is bad, the nation in itself is a good
and even a divine thing, and that while a racialism that results in the
bloody oppression of minorities is to be deplored, yet blood (race) is after
all thicker than water, as in the case of Gabriel Bagradian, the Paris-bred,
and his half-French, half-American son. (There is likewise a certain tacit
racial chauvinism in the author's attitude toward Juliette, Bagradian's
French wife).
If
the Armenians were massacred, it was on account of
the Young Turk of the Enver Pasha brand, who is the product of Europe's
interference with the slumbrous "spirituality" of the old Mohammedan
East, through the introduction of modern improvements, commerce and
the like.
All this, it may be repeated, is simply heaping confusion upon
coo–
fusion. And it all helps to explain how Hitlerism happened. There
iJ
no faintest hint of underlying social causes behind the phenomena of ram–
pant nationalisms and radicalisms,-nothing, in short, to disturb the
Book
of the Month Club reader, who was doubtless pro-Ally during the War,
as he revels in this tale of the Terrible Turk's atrocity (the anti-Hitlerian
writer seems to have, often, an almost Hitlerian fondness for blood), with–
out suspecting or caring to suspect the presence of not dissimilar if better
concealed horrors at home, for which he himself has his share of
social
responsibility.
SAMUEL PUTNAM
