214
PARTISAN REVIEW
whore who had been holding him up. As Gradere himself writes in the
unrepentant confession which precedes the murder, "The way into the
supernatural often starts in the depths." I understand this is a favorite
theme of Mauriac's. Opposed to Gradere is the young priest Alain
Forcas, the man of chastity who shelters the sinner beneath his roof.
At the end, "in Alain's heart, the old grievance rose again. He had
been cheated, robbed! What mockery, what derision! This criminal
would be saved, but he . . . he was lost. . . . And yet, in spite of the
stormy surface of his spirit, another voice, muted by distance, made
itself heard within his heart across a great chasm of misery: 'I am
there, fear not, I am there for ever.' "
The Mask of Innocence
is written with force and brevity, and tells
its story with dramatic, with melodramatic, verve. It is a very well-made
novel. And yet it is just words-French fluency that tries to persuade
us that the abstractions with which it deals are real. One gets a certain
effect by making theological statements in a fictional form. They have
an air of profundity-they
are
profound, and in an elegant French
and not heavy Teutonic way; but they are completely lacking in im–
aginative reality.
I quoted above from
The Mask oOf Innocence.
Let me quote from
Cousin Bazilio.
The passage occurs very early in the novel and is about
the man Luiza marries.
However, when his mother died, he began to feel a bit lonely. It was
in wintertime, and his room at the back of the house, to the southward,
caught all the gusts of wind in their howling sorrow. Above all, at night,
when he was leaning over the text-book with his feet on the mat, he
began to have fits of melancholy languor; and he stretched his arms
out with his breast full of only one desire: and that was to embrace a
slender sweet waist and to hear the
frau-frau
of a skirt rustling around
him. He decided to marry.
This is literature with all its baggage of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and ad–
jectives, but the words are alive. Mauriac's novel is full of art, but the
art is dead.
The Joker,
by Jean Malaquais, has less art (though more machin–
ery) than
The Mask of Innocence,
and represents a more radical de–
parture from the conventional novel; but to no avail-it is an unbe–
lievably boring work. A Kafkaesque fantasy about The City and One
Individual who refuses to consent to its regime of death and his own
obliteration, it is a compendium of all the cliches that have ever been
uttered about the Modem Metropolis. Malaquais seems to have had
