In Clarté the ideas of M. Barbusse are explained at full length: abolition of inheritance, universal disarmament, universal equality, universal Republic in the Federation of the World. In this book (which concerns the life of a clerk in the office of a factory, who marries, goes to the war, and returns to look at his wife and society, with not unkindly but disenchanted eyes)—M. Barbusse has lost his coarseness, but also that biting acid which imprinted on our remembrance the scenes of Le Feu. In his feminine characters—in the old aunt, in Marie, the wife, in the little blind girl whom every one pities and for whom no one cares—he shows a new quality of tenderness.
What will he give us to-morrow?
GEORGES DUHAMEL
Like Henri Barbusse, M. Georges Duhamel has found his great opportunity in the events of the war. Before 1914 we knew him as a young writer of promise in only too many directions. He had written a play, À l’Ombre de Statues, which Antoine produced at the Odéon Theatre, and which was (with Marie Lenéru’s Affranchis) the chief success of Antoine’s heroic voyage of discovery in the perilous tracts of unknown youthful genius. M. Duhamel was also just coming into notice as a poet and especially as a critic of poetry in the columns of the Mercure de France. We liked his young uncompromising voice and the deliberate way in which he said that he was proud to be born in the century which produced a Paul Claudel. He had as yet published no novel. But the mobilisation revealed his capacity as a doctor, and it was as an army-surgeon that he joined the forces.
His Vie des Martyrs (which Mr Heinemann has published in English as the New Book of Martyrs) revealed a considerable writer, with that rare gift of insight, of recognition, which pierces at a glance to the core of things. Tenderness, infinite pity, regret, a sense of the helplessness of science, a sense of the hopelessness of so-called progress which ends in such an explosion of organised disorder—it is these feelings that inspire the good physician as he bends above the murdered youths, the martyrs, whom it is his destiny always to torture and sometimes to cure or to relieve. La Vie des Martyrs is a set of brief sketches of the lives and deaths of wounded soldiers in hospital on the front.
With a brief, sure touch (which comes, I think, from his familiarity with the writing of verse), M. Duhamel indicates the few essential outlines which bring into living relief the poor lads to whom he ministers: the Zouave who thought himself so strong when his spine was touched with paralysis; Léglise, of whom his country claimed the double sacrifice of his two legs and who yet found life worth living; Boucheutore—but why enumerate the cases? It is not the cases that matter, it is the souls that animate these tortured and shattered bodies, which M. Duhamel knows how to make, as it were, transparent to our gaze. There is in these studies (as there was in the eyes of Béal) ‘une lumière, une douceur une tristesse extrêmes.’ We have heard of the religion of human suffering—and here it wells from a deep and loving nature, full of spiritual richness, and yet totally devoid of mysticism or piety.
I like La Vie des Martyrs better than Civilisation which followed it in 1918 and was awarded the Prix Goncourt last December. This latter book inclines to the theories of M. Barbusse: Oh, Civilisation, what crimes are committed in thy name! The setting is the same; the personages are still the wounded soldiers, but also the M.O.’s and great visiting Surgeons, sanitary inspectors, and in these latter sketches M. Duhamel reveals an admirable talent for caricature. There is something of Daumier’s biting wit in his portraits of medical ‘big-wigs.’
Here is a writer with great gifts, a master of tears and laughter. His sketches are admirable. But has he the gift of organic construction? Will he (as the draughtsman Boz became the painter Dickens) go on from strength to strength?
Time will show.