BOOKS
147
self with, nothing that he can really blame, no one whom he can hold
directly responsible for his misery:
"In this camp neither good nor evil, happiness or sorrow meant
anything at all: the one' object was survival. Tanguy learned to regard
every moment wrested from death as a tremendous victory. He learned
to speak sparingly; his most ordinary actions and gestures became clothed
in
new, almost symbolic meaning. These gestures were, in fact, the pub–
lic affirmation of his continued existence as an in¥iividual."
And so because he is reduced to rely for his survival on his primi–
tive humanity, on the emotions that he can support and recreate every
day in himself, and on the scraps of affection that he can salvage here
and there in a world gone to pieces, he is able to become what we can
only recognize as something very old-fashioned and unlikely: a hero.
In his life, the ancient and inspiring idea of adversity overcome, of a
human will resisting and defying life and society to do their worst, and
transcending through its own resources the worst that can be done, is
realized with simplicity and conviction.
Child of Our Time
is distinguished in the purity and sincerity of
its feelings-for that alone it deserves to be read. It is important for us
to know that these emotions are still possible, that they are not merely
literary and historical, and that a human being can still survive whatever
life the modern world offers him by resistance, by self-reliance-it is
even useful to know that a virtue like self-reliance is still conceivable
and may not be the self-deception that novels about young people regu–
larly tend to imply it is.
It is also important because it sets itself up against what I have
called the journalistic conception of. the human spirit.
It
denies that
we are simply and irredeemably what the world has made us; it repre–
sents a rediscovery of the internality of spirit, a rediscovery that every
person has always to make for himself. It tells us that we still have that
greatest gift, the energy of life itself, and that this energy of inner life
is as important and as determining as all the terrible and dreary and
coarsening experiences that seem to be the lot of so many of us in these
times.
Steven Marcus
