Dawn or Conflagration?

THE NEW DAY -Jules Remains -Knopf ($3).

Subject of the tenth volume of Remains' vast Men Of Good Will is the U.S.S.R. in 1922, as it impinges upon the minds and hopes of various Parisians. As literature, The New Day is as engrossing as Remains' previous volumes. As journalism, it will stimulate the average "man of good will," but baffle him oftener.

The spirit of the first half of the volume is beautifully suggested by its French title, Cette Grande Lueur a L'Est (which the translator insipidly renders into Promise of Dawn). The young politician Jerphanion compares the magnetism of the Soviets with that of Verdun six years before: "There is something in it of that same sense of a distant melting pot, of a light shining through the darkness-a great blaze of light. ... It may be the dawn; it may be a conflagration. But whether we believe it to be one or the other, we are all agog to get there. . . ."

This ambiguous light flickers on the faces of Remains' characters as they move in the darkness of a post-war Paris from which, for them, security and human hope have vanished. Sampeyre, who represents the finest traditions of 19th-Century liberalism, no longer feels at ease in talking with the "little set" he had reigned over before the war; too many of the newcomers are Comrades who talk dogmatic stereotypes which are the death of all free discussion. The gentle schoolmaster, Clanricard, sick at heart in his wife's betrayal of him, makes genteel love to a young Russian and gets the whole sexual dialectic thrown at his head; even so, he thinks: "If enthusiasm and integrity are still to be found in this world, it is in Moscow that they must be sought." From the Genoa conference Jerphanion's friend Jallez writes him of the Russian delegates "they give me the same feeling as pickpockets at a fair or crooks in a casino." But Jallez, too, is swept by the hope of visiting Russia soon.

Part II, The World Is Your Adventure, settles down to Russia proper. It is the summer of great famine; the New Economic Policy is but a few months old. The torn political-economic tissues-which had bound Russia to Western Europe are beginning to mend, and European capitalists are coming to Moscow "like so many giant corpuscles working towards an abscess." Corpuscle Haverkamp and Corpuscle Champcenais are among them; their attitude towards Soviet Russia is that of imperial colonizers toward a savage kingdom. Warmer and more confused is the attitude of Minister Buitton and Jerphanion, who is his secretary. But Jerphanion confesses: "What I actually found was a lot of noisy fellows who started lying from the word go . . .in order to deceive me and send me away with a wholly fallacious idea which they expected me to broadcast. . . ."

Jallez comes in by way of Odessa. Romains' account of the run-around the Russians give him is as icily slick as the run-around itself. But his reporting of the famine is harder to swallow whole. The drought and the European blockade, Jallez finds, are far less responsible for the famine than the subhuman corruptness of the local officials. This and other arraignments, just or not, are set down in much too general and unqualified terms. But the volume ends with much, obviously (and as usual), still to be said.

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