384
PARTISAN REVIEW
VerdouJ,<:'s original point is clear enough: business is like murder
and therefore murder is only a kind of business. Obviously this is not the
strict truth; just as obviously, it is more valuable than the strict truth:
no satirist could do much with the proposition that business is
sometimes
like murder. And, of course, the final product of the totality of the
world's business usually does turn out to be murder. Verdoux is on firm
ground, theoretically.
In practice, however, the matter immediately becomes more com–
plicated, as Verdoux himself is to some extent forced to recognize. Crime
does not pay, after all-not in a small way, that is. "Numbers sanctify,"
Verdoux says, trying to prove that his death on the guillotine is no
more than a business failure. But he is wrong to minimize the guillotine.
What could be worse than a business failure? Perhaps there is more
justice in his death than he is prepared to admit.
The complications go further than this. Despite the clarity of his
original perceptions, Verdoux becomes corrupt, and with the corruption
not so much of a murderer as of a businessman. It is a hard struggle, he
tells us; I go into the jungle only because I must fight for my wife and
my child, all that I love in the world. When he says this he is not to be
trusted. The jungle is everything to him and his home is only his con–
venient excuse--characterless blond child and colorless dull wife (how
useful that she is crippled!), existing only so that he may have a symbol
to justify his ambition. This is not my doing, he says; I found myself
unwanted and I was forced to go into business for myself. But is it not
best of all to be in business for oneself? He betrays himself as we watch:
only in the jungle world of his calling does he display animation and
charm, competence as a social being and a man of affairs, a sense of his
own powers and his own position. At home he is only the suburbanite,
momentarily relaxed and safe, indeed, but impatient to get back to the
real world of business. Even a great domestic event-when Verdoux on
his wedding anniversary brings his wife the deed to their home, a pledge
of security and the happy fruit of his labors-is made flat and insignifi–
cant. "What is that?" the child asks, and the mother replies, "It is the
deed to this beautiful house and garden"-the blessings of the bourgeois
home must be counted to be seen.
Much later-after Verdoux has been ruined in a financial crash,
and after the shots of newspaper headlines and marching men-there is
one sentence to tell us what became of this home: "Soon after the crash,
I lost my wife and child," Verdoux says, explaining why he has no more
heart for business. And he adds, insisting on his point: "However, they
are happier where they are." Thus with a word the crippled wife and
the blond child are gone, and as their existence seemed not enough to
account for his activity, so their disappearance seems not enough to_ac–
count for his decline. One feels again that Verdoux is deceiving himself
