BOO KS
599
cerned." This novella, evidently an earlier work than the fine
Memoirs
of Hadrian,
is likewise a reminiscence in the first person: Erick von
Lhomond, a soldier of fortune, recounts to his comrades an episode
of his youth, twenty years past, when, just after the First World War,
he led a corps of volunteers against the Bolsheviks in Kurland. The
story, set against the military action, concerns von Lhomond's love for
his boyhood friend Conrad, and the love of Conrad's sister Sophie, in
turn, for von Lhomond. Both relations are hidden from the excluded
third parties, until discovery brings on, or imposes, the catastrophe. I
say "imposes," because the accidents of war cooperate in such a way
with the working out of personal destinies as to impair the strict tragic
design, making it seem adventitious. Though Mme. Yourcenar disclaims
any political intention for her narrative, I could not help thinking that
there is a species of existentialist melodrama no more convincing than
the common kind; something I thought also about Camus's
The Fall.
I am sorry to have to give it as my opinion that this work fails
of any profound effect; there seem such good reasons why it ought
not to have failed, among them the evident intelligence of the author,
the tension promised by the anecdote, and the fineness of the style so
far as this can be seen in translation; yet among so many virtues I miss
some essential.
The fictional convention of the memoir-that beautiful and some–
how specifically civilized convention according to which the story and
the telling of the story are of equal importance-seems to work very
awkwardly here. The publishers make a particular point of "the swift–
ness of this narrative," but short as the book is I cannot agree that it
moves rapidly. The narrator's somewhat professionally world-weary
aphorisms and generalities more than interrupt, they seem often to re–
place, the action. Moreover, this narrator seems in another way
ill–
suited to the business of narrating; he is a man for whom the paradoxical
value of the first person singular- its reflection of others, its capacity
for portraiture, as in Marlow's narrations, or Marcel's, or Ishmael's–
scarcely exists. The other elements of his story, Conrad and Sophie,
are not at all convincing; the existence of the one cannot contend
against so vast an indifference, that of the other is but dimly and in–
termittently perceptible among the aphorisms. Consequently there is no
tension, and the resolution, itself rather mechanical, resolves nothing;
while von Lhomond's tone of resignation, ranging from stoicism through
cynicism to mere boredom, finally succeeded in convincing me, I fear,
that all this did not matter in the least.
Patrick White, an Australian, comes to us very highly recommended
