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aims-a symptom of the current merger of art and officialdom.
Frederic Prokosch's
Age of Thunder
is pure pot-boiler, and
if
it's
not exactly ham that's in the pot, it's
"coq-au-vin
and the wonderful
omelettes," as befits the French setting. Secret agent Jean-Nicolas Martin,
on orders from London, goes from the Haute-Savoie to Switzerland to
check up on the underground and uncover leaks in secret information.
He travels over mountains and rivers, through forests of pine and lush
eroticism, with a properly queer and poetical assortment of companions
-including a Negro, Quivar, designed to end, once and for all, race
prejudice in America-who discuss food and philosophy and get lost or
shot up on the way. Martin en route meets the Italian girl whom he
wiil have on both sides of the Swiss border, a Macedonian, an Arab and
an Annamite, thrown in for cosmopolitanism, and the Gestapo, who let
him off scot-free. Somewhere in the course of his adventures, which the
reviewers in the
Times
(New York and London) assure us are the very
stuff of myth and fable, Martin accomplishes his mission, the leaks are
plugged like so much plumbing, and Hollywood has another movie for
the asking, provided the war does not end too soon.
These three novels have a curious trait in common: in all of them,
the Germans, precisely at that level where they are held to be most
lacking, come off well ahead of our side as rational, or rationalizing
men who pretend to know what they are about. Glenway Wescott's
Captain Kalter gives an account of German war aims that is, as far as
ideology goes, the clearest thing in the book. Prokosch's
Oberbefehlshaber
tells us what he is fighting for with an eloquence that Churchill has
never thought necessary to devote to the same purpose, and the position
of Captain Ritter in
The Power House
is also made clear, plausible and
attractive. Furthermore, in all three novels the heroes are cast upon and
obtain the mercy of the Germans. Captain Ritter arrests Vernier for
sabotage and releases him; Prokosch's Nazi sees Jean-Nicolas to the door
and bids him a sentimental farewell, and Glenway Wescott has a German
major intervene to protect the Helianos family from Kalter's posthumous
malevolence. A fourth novel,
The Hideout
by Egon Hostovsky, even
goes to the length of presenting the Nazi as a beloved school chum. I
cannot account for this attribution of rationality and mercy to the Ger–
mans, so much at variance with our writers' apparent purposes. It may
be that as the war becomes "less and less ideological" for us, it becomes
more ideological for the Germans; in which case our novelists are apply–
ing Churchill's principle to their characterizations. But this would not
account for the
Barmherzigkeit
inconsistently attributed to the Nazis.
Perhaps men of weak political convictions cannot help feeling a desire
to participate in certainties-even of Nazism.
Although not a war book,
The End of All Men,
by C. F. Ramuz,
embodies a theme that may have been suggested by the war. The earth's
orbit shrinks, the planet draws nearer the sun and all life withers away.
