Occasionally one finds a Spaniard who seems almost a moderate, like Frankie Perez in Adventures of a Young Man, but the most persistent impression is one of a people who have a history of misrule and violence, and who tragically turn to these very weapons as the instruments of release from their consequences.
GREECE: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT
George Weller’s Greeks in The Crack in the Column appear surprisingly like Latins: “Each Greek is a volcano, and when he may erupt no man knows, not even his friends who must quake with him, not even himself.” In the number and complexity of their political parties they resemble the French, yet in one way they seem to retain something of the Greeks of antiquity viewing Imperial Rome. Small and impoverished in the shadow of newly-risen giants, they cherish their role as inheritors and transmitters of a great culture. At the book’s end, Nitsa, like Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, retires with her reflections:
The whole world is philhellene, as proved by the retreating Germans leaving a wreath on the Tomb of Ignotos before they roared north to die in the ambushes of the Slavs. But most self-surrendering of the philhellenes are the Americans. These young antiques deserve the most utter respect, the kindest care.
FRANCE: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT
The novels by Frenchmen in this study reveal relatively little about national character and behavior. Stendhal deals with Italians and Malraux primarily with Chinese. However, the ambitious Ferral, head of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium in Man’s Fate may be revealing. He hopes to make enough money in China to return home and buy the leading French news-gathering and publicity syndicate. With this power he hopes to regain office and “pit the combined forces of the cabinet and a bought public opinion against the Parliament.” In Malraux’s words one catches, under their cynicism, echoes of the declining power reflecting upon vanished days of affluence:
The threat of bankruptcy brings to financial groups an intense national consciousness. When their enterprises in distant corners of the world are suddenly threatened with disaster they remember with mingled pride and gratitude the heritage of civilization which their country has given them and which they in turn have helped to pass on to colonial peoples.
In Presidential Agent Sinclair presents the French as a people who have installed a rotten government to manage their affairs, a government eager to join with Britain in obtaining temporary surcease from German threats to its financial holdings by hypocritically sacrificing Czechoslovakia. They had decided upon “a compromise with Hitler as the cheapest form of insurance.” M. Denis admits the resultant loss of power in Central Europe, but consoles himself with the thought that “we still have North Africa and the colonies, and we are safe behind our Maginot Line. Above all, we don’t have to make any more concessions to revolution at home.”
In The Age of Longing Hydie Anderson reports Feyda Nikitin’s deadly activities to Jules Commanche of the French Home Security Department. A scholar and hero of the Resistance, he is one of a new type, but there are not enough of them to fill “the sclerotic veins of French bureaucracy with fresh blood.” Their effect amounts merely to “the injection of a stimulant into a moribund body.” In The Reprieve Sartre had presented France as unaware and unready before the Nazis, already bled white from great wars. After another conflict, the patient is almost in extremis. Playing the recurrent part of American pupil to European teacher, Hydie listens to Commanche’s bitter lecture:
Our last message to the world was those three words which are on our stamps and coins. Since then, we no longer have anything to give to the spirit, only to the senses—our novelists, our poets, our painters, all belong to an essentially sensualist world, the world of Flaubert, and Baudelaire and Manet, not to the world of Descartes, Rousseau and St. Just. For several centuries we were the inspiration of Europe; now we are in the position of a blood donor dying of anemia. We can’t hope for a new Jeanne d’Arc, not even for a young First Consul, not even for a Charlotte Corday....