146
PARTISAN REVIEW
longer a child.... His only conscious awareness was of being unbeliev–
ably old. The knowledge that he was only nine seemed an absurdity."
Betrayed by his parents, utterly orphaned, living through the most hide–
ous events in the history of the race, surrounded by mur.der, inhumanity,
savagery, he manages to survive, and to survive with honor, to sustain
himself as an individual who recognizes himself as one, and who wants
to go on living.
Nor do the horrors end when the war does. Tanguy
is
shipped off
to Spain and taken into an orphanage-reformatory run by an order of
Brothers; and then the same thing begins allover again, for this place
is just another concentration camp. "'You're not in France now,' the
man in the cassock said. His voice was flat and dull. 'We give your
kind of scum some discipline here. You'll stick to the rules
if
you know
what's good for you. Otherwise--' " And he is treated like scum again,
and again he survives, to escape and find refuge at a college run by a
kindly Jesuit who helps him begin to put together the pieces of life
that are left to him. Finally, after several other demoralizing experiences,
he smuggles himself back into France and after more than twelve years
of appalling destitution meets once more the parents who had deserted
and betrayed him. They are impossible people (but very unlike the sad
old incompetents that most current novels about the young specialize
in), and Tanguy finds he must get away from them and make his
own life.
How this miracle happened-for it does seem miraculous that a
recognizable human being with wants and passions, with self-respect, with
will and the power of stubborn defiance should emerge alive from
these experiences-I don't think it possible or wise to try to ascertain.
There are, however, certain recurrent images in the novel that arrest the
reader and seem worth looking at by reason of their quality of anachron–
ism. The chief of these is the image of the orphan; never, I believe, since
Oliver Twist
has the experience of the neglected child been written
about with such purity and poignancy.
«He felt in himself the collective nostalgia of all children who, twith–
out parents and without love, still dream of the Christmas season. The
unspoken yearning of children everywhere stirred in him: those that
Dickens portrayed in his Christmas Carol, all orphans and charity boys
and everyone, boy
or
girl, that had never known true affection. lHe
felt in his innermost heart what all these poordeprivtid creatures felt:
the lack of any happy memories."
In the jungle of the concentration camp, Tanguy has nothing to
fall back upon, no institution or organization that he can protect him-
