PARTISAN REVIEW
gone to synagogue to pray," one of these fragments ends, and in that
plain sentence captures some of the sadness and complexity of the early
days of the Russian Revolution. The exploits of Benya Krik, a notorious
Odessa gangster, are worthy of comparison with Gogo!.
All of Babel's work ought to be available in
this
country. Shocken
is to be congratulated for publishing him, but one regrets the decision
to present him so meekly and meagerly by isolating the Jewish stories.
Queneau's novel,
The Skin of Dreams,
is episodic, gay, witty and
scandalous, extremely literary, full of slang, puns, mock-scenarios, and
outrageous characters. I suppose one might say it is the sort of thing
Kenneth Patchen tries to do, but the results are all in Queneau's favor,
since his work has just that quality semi-surrealist fiction must have–
it is great fun to read. In the end its virtuosity arid extraordinary main–
tenance of the picaresque tone stay in the mind more firmly than the
characters and their adventures. The translation must have been perilous
and H. J. Kaplan has done a superb job.
Playing
for K eeps
by Roger Vailland, a Resistance novel,
is
a
familiar French article, stuffed high, like a prosperous housewife's
marketbasket, with existential wine and meaty tidbits of sex, narcotics,
and dialectics. (The number of dope injections in current French fic–
tion makes our marijuana raids seem an inexplicably old-fashioned
repression of an innocent pastime.) The Resistance hero, a man who
can make up his mind, is here again: thirty-six years old, the survivor
of Marxism, Mallarme, Andre Breton, an atheist and realist, a reluctant
fighter for the cause. "I come of a middle-class family. I am fighting as
hard as I know against my class, but I have inherited its vices, and I
love its luxury and its pleasures. Many things which the militant com–
munist does not even suspect, play a large part in my life...."
Vailland's novel appeared in France in 1945, the same year Sartre's
lf.ge of R eason
and Simone de Beauvoir's
The Blood of Others
were
published. There is an uncomfortable, ghostly repetition of character
and accent in all of these novels and Vailland, reaching the American
reader last, suffers accordingly the handicaps of his poor post position in
the race.
All Hallow's Eve,
the first of Charles Williams' novels to be pub–
lished here, arrives with an introduction from T. S. Eliot and friendly
notice by C. S. Lewis. We have the feeling that we are making, in
Williams, the acquaintance of a respectable English eccentric, a peculiar
and special man, not likely
to
cause a sensation, but solidly rooted in
his own set which is, to all appearances, religious, at least in the loosest
sense of the term. It is hopeless to try to reach a synopsis of the events
1352
