92
PARTISAN REVIEW
is the position of Duhamel, for example, in his latest sentimental series,
of the painter-novelist, Maurice Vlaminck, in his
La Haute-Folie
of last
year, as of M . Paul Bourget, when, a good part of a century ago, he
exclaimed,
"Ahi Ia hrll'fJe classe moyenne, Ia so/ide at vail/ante bourgenisit
que possede encore Ia France!"
And has not Count Carlo Sforza said
something as to the ability of the bourgeoisie to defend itself?
If
you want
to see just how
"so/ide"
and how
"vaiL/ante''
that same bourgeoisie was
in France, for some twenty or thirty years preceding the War, read
Les
cloches de Bale.
Aragon shows, by a terrible sledgehammer piling up of
fact on fact, set off at times by a biting irony in every line, how hopelessly
rotting the system, all society, was in those days, how inextricably inter·
laced the gangrene was, and how nothing could come out of it but catas·
trophe.
In this respect, and the point is to be stressed, Aragon's book is the
real article, of which such a work as Romains'
Men of Good fVill
is but
a shoddy imitation. It is, so far as this reviewer is aware, alone in its field.
A second thing which the author has done is to portray for us three
significant types of women, the woman of the day before yesterday, of
yesterday and of tomorrow. His Diane is what might be described as the
respectable whore type, of the .
fin du siecle
and early century. His
Catherine may be termed ·"the whore's daughter," rebellious, would-be–
decent, but for all of that, still
economically
a kept woman, with longings
that must remain futile for a social reality vaguely represented to her by
the working class-the best she can do is to flounder and flirt with anarch–
ism. And finally, there is the woman of the future, typified for the author
by Clara Zetkin, who led to the founding of the Communist Party in
France, and to whom he devotes an ecstatic non-narrative epilogue.
Aragon's third accomplishment is bound up with his portrayal of
Catherine, or the transitional-type woman. A bit hard to put into words,
it has to do with the description, and above all, with the delimitation of
the true proletarian-revolutionary consciousness, the silly ineffectualness,
for instance, of a movement such as anarchism being shown up for all time,
with all proletarian defeatism nipped in the bud. Read the chauffeur
Victor's declamation against suicide as working class treason , and then
remember that Louis Aragon once took part in a Surerealist
enquete
on
the subject,
"Le suicide, est-il une solution?"
He has gone far since then!
Yet another contribution which this novel has to make is a long,
vivid and stirring description of the great 144-days Parisian chauffeurs'
strike of 1911-12,, which is still labor history. Here, Aragon distinctly
shows that, while coming himself from the upper bourgeoisie, he can
handle proletarian material. On the whole, however, while far more
slashing and venomous,
Les cloches de Bale
is rather to be compared to
such a work as
The Executioner Waits.
There is lacking entirely the
mannered hardboildness of many of our young proletarian writers. The
book is written in Aragon's own superb prose, in an idiom enriched by
slang and common speech; but there is no faintest trace of modernistic
posture; it is revolutionary realism of the highest quality.
SAMUEL PUTNAM
