434
PARTISAN REVIEW
he was confused with Sartre.
La Peste
should go a long way toward
clearing up this misunderstanding.
A better novel than
The Stranger, The Plague
(as it will doubtless
be called in English) benefits from the fact that its narrator, who is no
less lucid than the earlier one, is much more articulate. Hence the uni–
versality of his struggle should be more immediately apparent.
There is great variety in this prose: the two sermons by the Jesuit
priest are worthy to be compared with the brilliant one in J oyce's
Portrait
of the Artist;
at another point we have a passage that is reminiscent of
Proust and, again, a satiric description of various types of bureaucrats
of which Anatole France would not have been ashamed. Few will now
be able to contest the fact that Camus is already one of France's major
novelists and a
moraliste
in her best tradition.
JusTIN O'BRIEN
DIONYSUS AS RATIONALIST
THE PoRTABLE LAWRENCE.
Edited
by
Diana Trilling. Viking.
$2.00.
T
HE STRIKING THING about D. H. Lawrence is that with his limitless
energy he drives everything up out of the depths. His method of
writing is to provide a bright, durable, and variegated surface, which
he burnishes and hammers into heat and light. Images of light and in–
candescence abound in all of Lawrence's writing. He is, almost, a neo–
classical writer; he has the same relentless impulse to push everything
up to the surface that we feel in Swift or Voltaire. It is a great style, as
Mrs. Trilling says, though sometimes we wish that the surface were
less relentlessly maintained and that Lawrence would let us down easily
into the depths by saying something dim or obscure.
This surface quality perhaps contributes as much to our current
neglect of Lawrence as do the other factors Mrs. Trilling lists in her
introduction-his intemperate tone; his emotional excess, so often in–
commensurate with the subject at hand; his apparently total rejection
of the Christian-democratic ethos;
his
sometimes irresponsible politics;
his cruelty. Most of the best modern writing is in one way or another
symbolic; we are accustomed
to
look for exfoliations and levels of mean–
ing, for multiplicities of reference. But in Lawrence's best writing there
is really only one level that counts for very much. And when he tries
for large symbolic effects, as
in
The Plumed Serpent,
the whole thing
collapses miserably of its own oppressive deadweight.
True, much of Lawrence's fiction is constructed around characters
whom we can easily trace back to Lawrence's father, or his mother, or
himself in relation to them. Or his characters can be shown to represent
the forces of his own emotional conflicts. But that is not to say that his
