BOOKS
1281
These processes are all at work, heightened,
in
what seems to me,
Madame de Beauvoir's most impressive work to date. The story con–
cerns Regina, an actress, who suffers from all the existential maladies
that afflicted Francoise
in
She Came to Stay.
Her ego cannot tolerate
for an instant that anyone else should enjoy love or esteem. She can–
not bear the thought that some day she will die and naturally, this
notion constantly crosses her mind. Finally she meets Fosca who has
been made immortal by swallowing an elixir. Most of the familiar
existentialist concepts and tropes turn up in Fosca's narration as he
takes us from the wars between the Italian city-states to the approxi–
mate present. No effort is made to establish Fosca's compulsory immor–
ality with any degree of plausibility. Madame de Beauvoir gives us an
allegory not of the inevitable agony of human life but of a specific,
quasi-pathologic horror, a state of being which, like existentialism itself,
is dependent on a local culture with a width of human reference that
is wholly indeterminate at present.
But this horror, whatever its content, is imaginatively realized in
many of the pages of
All men Are Mortal.
The horror rises like a sick–
ening odor from Fosca's metamorphoses. Nor are we dealing with a mere
venture into the macabre, for even if such horror can be traced to a
perversion of the conditions of human existence, it is a perversion
which is sunk deep into the structure of Western civilization. Con–
sciously or unconsciously, everything in this work, its compulsiveness,
the monotony, gruesome exaggeration, repetitiveness and occasional po–
etry of the historic pageant, contribute to its single emotion. Indeed,
it is amazing just how perfectly the existentialist system seems to con–
tain and unify all Madame de Beauvoir's feelings for human relation–
ships. For Fosca, with his perpetual recoil from love to indifference, his
hatred of death and fear of life, his desire to run the universe and his
despair when it is refractory to his will, is surely a legitimate embodi–
ment of the European male intellectual as apprehended by a French–
woman engaged in a somewhat tardy feminist rebellion.
The Vagabond
is
among Colette's purest compositions, a novel
from which nearly everything has been removed but the one life-process
which she was probably the first to bring into literature; the endless,
secret, intimate welling-up of feminine feeling, stirred and released by
the smallest objects, the minutest tremor, to the same extent as it is by
the big or grand, always poetic and ultimate as it reveals little of the
nature of the object and its humdrum connection with the rest of the
external world, but attracts and uses things, places, people and scenes
only to foster and maintain that magically pulsing flow as if that and
