Pity for Women
by
[Knopf, $2.75]
IN Paris I heard but one criticism of Henri de Montherlant, and that was from a Communist who wrote fairy tales for Paris-soir. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘ De Montherlant is one of the best writers we have; unfortunately he is unable to forget that he is an aristocrat and a bullfighter.’ Now by that he meant that De Montherlant, in allowing his lucid and brilliant talent to play over experience, sampled aspects of life for his amusement instead of interpreting them as a serious writer. His treatment seemed to be precious rather than profound.
In the present work that opinion is refuted. Here is a novel in the great tradition of nineteenth-century French letters, reënforced by the experience of the war and the new ways of the twentieth century, undoubtedly one of the clearest expressions of modern French thought yet published in this country. The relations of the great novelist, Pierre Costals, and the three women who love him make a marvelously complicated pattern which is explored with absolute intellectual integrity. Costals is that rare participant whose analysis of an emotional situation retains the steel-like quality of the French mind, quite without pity for self. I believe this quality, which at bottom is again honesty, is responsible for the excitement in the reader, and the anger, terror, and pleasure so engendered. It is a book which will make many women furious, for it is ruthless, but to other readers it will communicate a sense of uneasiness and admiration.
Technically it is brilliant, unhampered by the letter form that builds the relationships. The basis of study, man’s pity for the women he cannot do without, is pursued in accordance with the definition that pity is decadence. Costals is a strong man, yet he cannot strangle that pity in himself. There is a profound significance in the final letter to his bastard son where Costals tells him frankly that he expects much of him, for it is just such demands in the women who love him
that change the novelist’s pity to deliberate cruelty — like the letters of Andrée Hacquebaut, for instance, those terrible appeals of an unmarried provincial intellectual that, for the most part unanswered, grow increasingly more painful, ridiculous, and naked, and lose their ’literary’ quality.
JOHN WALCOTT