Quiet Achievement

WRITE SORROW ON THE EARTH (260 pp.) -- Charles Christian Wertenbaker --Holt ($2.75).

This short, admirable novel about the French Resistance is written in a prose style which suggests that Author Wertenbaker is a refugee from the dictatorship of Ernest Hemingway. But if he ever suffered under that brilliant dictatorship, he is his own master now. He has fashioned an unobstreperous, supple instrument with which he can handle whatever he pleases. With deceptive quietness, he chooses to handle a good deal.

Write Sorrow on the Earth is chiefly the story of three people: an ex-professor named Paul Boissiere, a young Spaniard whose nom-de-guerre is Bob, and Paul's wife Simone. Paul, at 38, is a middle-class intellectual whose revolutionary sympathies, though they have not frozen him along a party line, have impelled him to become a leader among the maquisards of the Vercors, in southeastern France. Bob, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, is already, at 24, a seasoned revolutionary soldier. Paul and Bob have developed a close father-&-son--and brain-&-bravery --friendship which is impaired when Bob is tortured by the Germans (for Paul is inadequate to restore his broken courage), and destroyed when Bob, on a mission to Paris, becomes the lover of Paul's wife. In many ways the most searching and powerful passages in the book are those in which the husband and wife face this betrayal and learn, through painful self-examination, to re-evaluate themselves, their responsibilities and their marriage.

Then Paul returns to the front. The rest of the book is the plain, grim tragedy of men hopelessly trapped--thanks largely to the fact that the U.S. Army didn't bother to parachute them their long-promised heavy machine guns. TIME-LIFE Correspondent Wertenbaker's handling of these and other military passages indicates that experience as a journalist is not always fatal to creative writing.

Write Sorrow on the Earth must be described as a "secondary" novel, in the sense that it would probably never have been written if Malraux and, to a lesser extent, Hemingway, had not broken similar ground in a somewhat similar way. It also shows one chief lack within itself: it does not have much of the kind of energy which usually distinguishes powerfully talented novels. Yet it shines bright and steady beside many novels which have such energy. It has none of the death-neurosis or neurotic heroics of Malraux; none of the softness of Steinbeck or Hersey; none of the chest-thumping and little of the romanticism of Hemingway. It is the work of a good rather than of a possibly great novelist; it is also the work of a mature and intelligent man.

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