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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Defenceless Village

Defenceless Village

This acidulous, detailed creation of a small French village is in its own way magnificent. If the translator’s prose gives a correct indication of the French original, M. du Gard has true style, the capacity to produce a verbal equivalent for each and every kind of sensibility of which he is aware. One’s criticism comes from another quarter, possibly illegitimate. The book, for all its brilliance, drains the reader; for it is the description of the interior of a prison without doors. The cover blurb describes it as ‘unsentimental’. True; but what has M. du Gard found to replace sentimentality, that refuge for the weak mind offended by human evil?

His central character, the postman Joigneau, strides through the pages like an incubus, his hairy hand on the pulse of the secret life of the village, and motivated by a lust for power which can be gratified as efficiently in the sharp- edged village world as in the larger arena of commerce and politics. The men and women whom he meets on his daily round are shown to us in undress, in the midst of their furtive desires, their domestic hatreds, their defensive mechanical piety. The author has not seen fit to cover them with the coat of his own compassion. He is indeed in the line of direct descent from de Maupassant. His splendidly convincing portraits in vinegar derive three-dimensional solidity, not through an exploration of their states of being, but rather from a complete understanding of their animality.

This is in itself strong medicine, and within its own efficient scope, much to be praised. But the author’s work remains static. That area of conflict which provides the great novelist with his themes, the remorse and redeeming tenderness that shadow the sexual wish, the ghost of human dignity and virtue always ready to burst its egotistic chains and become real – that true battlefield of the heart and mind is beyond his scope. His world is smaller than the one we live in.