88
PARTISAN REVIEW
to an ironically appropriate climax when Nicholson, impervious to
Joyce's explanations, sabotaged the saboteurs and thus caused both sides
to be blown up by the mortar shells of Warden, their mutual comrade
in
arms.
There was every reason, I realized, why Nicholson had to remain
obstinate to the last; only by blowing him up instead of the bridge
could Boulle tie together all the sardonic paradoxes that he had put
into
The Bridge over the River K wai:
at the psychological· level it was
the climactic example of Nicholson's heroic yet self-deluded nature,
and it thus provided the final thrust in Boulle's comic portrait of the
British character seen from the French point of view; while, more
widely, the final fatal misunderstanding underlined both the essential
anarchy underlying the rigid obedience exacted by military organiza–
tions, and the blind destructiveness latent in the West's mastery of the
means, but not the ends, of its technology.
Boulle's paradoxes, I had to concede, were real enough, and he
had brought them together into a neatly structured plot with admirable
clarity and economy; but the price he had paid for them still seemed
rather too high. Mainly because the contradictions were taken too far;
but also, perhaps, because they had prevented any deeper insight into
the way the prisoners on the Burma-Siam railway, beset by endless con–
tradictory appeals and dangers, had actually arrived at some sort of
equilibrium.
It
was, I supposed, the eternal English answer to the cele–
brated logical clarity of the French to assert that understanding, de–
cency, and even survival, depend less on logic than on a patient effort
to make the best of all the anomalies which surround us; and Boune's
pursuit of paradox seemed to have led him to overlook the fact that
the real heroes of the prison camps, like the real heroes of everywhere
else, were those whose intelligence, awareness and determination enabled
them to face whatever they found confronting them in such a way that
they and their fellows could decently survive.
Five years after reading Boulle's novel I heard that someone called
Sam Spiegel had made a movie of it, and that the director was David
Lean. I remembered how Lean's refusal to soften or glamorize had
made
Brief Encounter
so harrowingly convincing, and I went to see
The Bridge on the R iver Kwai
hoping that it would recapture something
of the way that things had really been.
The first shots were very exciting: there they were, the vultures,
the narrow cuttings, the bedraggled prisoners on the line, the long huts
with their atap roofs, the graves, the eternal sergeant-major, the derisive
