And in spite of this sensible suicide, or because it is so reasonable, his wager will be irrational and optimistic: he bets on the continuity of the human adventure, writing his last words for Jacques’ son.
This double obliteration, by death and by fidelity to what will live on, makes Antoine vanish into the very stuff of history, of which men’s hopes are made, and whose roots are human misfortune. In this respect, the remark of Antoine’s that touches me most deeply is the one he jots down shortly before his death: “I’ve only been an average man.” This is true, in a way, whereas Jacques, by the same standards, is someone exceptional.
But it is the average man who gives the whole work its strength, illuminates its underlying movement, and crowns it with this admirable Epilogue. After all, the truth Ulysses represents includes Antigone’s as well, although it does not hold the other way round. What are we to think of the creator who can build, silently and without commentaries, two characters who are so different and so commanding?
Since I have concentrated on the relevance of Martin du Gard’s work to the present day, I still must show that his very doubts are our own. The birth of an awareness of history in the Thibault brothers is paired with the posing of a problem we can well understand. Summer 1914, which reveals along with the impending war the failure of socialism in circumstances decisive to the future of the world, offers a summary of all Martin du Gard’s doubts. He was not lacking in lucidity.
We know that Summer 1914, appearing in 1936, was published long after The Death of the Father (1929). During this long interval, Martin du Gard carried out a veritable revolution in the structure of his work. He abandoned his original plan, and decided to give Les Thibault an ending different from the one he had originally intended. The first plan involved thirty or so volumes; the second reduces Les Thibault to eleven.
Martin du Gard had no hesitation next about destroying the manuscript of L’Appareillage (Setting Sail), a volume which was to follow The Death of the Father and which had cost him two years’ work. Between 1931. the date of this sacrifice, and 1933, the year when armed with a new plan he began to write Summer 1914, there were two years of quite natural confusion. This is perceptible in the book’s very structure. After a long pause the machine at first had some difficulty getting started again, and really gets going only in the second volume.
But it seems to me that we also feel this change in a number of new perspectives. Begun at the moment of Hitler’s ascendance to power, when the Second World War could already be sensed on the horizon, this great historical fresco of a conflict men tried to hope would be the last is almost compelled to call itself into question. In Vieille France, written during the years when Martin du Gard had given up Les Thibault, the schoolmistress was already asking herself a formidable question: “Why is the world like this? Is it really society’s fault?… Is it not rather man’s own fault?”
The same question worries Jacques at the height of his revolutionary fervor, just as it explains most of Antoine’s attitudes toward historical events. One can therefore suppose it must have haunted the novelist himself.
None of the contradictions of social action are, in any case, eluded in the long, perhaps overlong, ideological conversations that fill Summer 1914. The main problem, the use of violence in the cause of justice, is discussed at great length in the conversations between Jacques and Mithoerg. The famous distinction between the yogi and the commissar has already been made by Martin du Gard: within the revolution, in fact, it brings about the confrontation between the apostle and the technician. Better still, the nihilistic aspect of the revolution is isolated, in order to be treated in depth, in the character of Meynestrel.
The latter believes that after having put man in the place of God, atheism ought to go even further and abolish man himself. Meynestrel’s reply, when asked what will replace man, is “Nothing.” Elsewhere, the Englishman Patterson defines Meynestrel as “the despair of believing in nothing.” Finally, like all those who join the revolution from nihilism, Meynestrel believes that the best results are achieved by the worst means.
He has no hesitation about burning the secret papers Jacques has brought back from Berlin, which prove the collusion between the Prussian and Austrian general staffs. The publication of these documents would risk altering the attitude of the German social democrats, thus making the war, which Meynestrel considers as the “trump card” for social upheaval, far less likely.
These examples are enough to show that there was nothing naïve in Martin du Gard’s socialism. He cannot manage to believe that perfection will one day be embodied in history. If he does not believe this, it is because his doubt is the same as the schoolteacher’s in Vieille France.
This doubt concerns human nature. “His pity for men was infinite; he gave them all the love his heart contained; but whatever he did, however hard he tried, he remained skeptical about man’s moral potentialities.” To be certain only of men, and to know that men have little worth, is the cry of pain that runs through the whole of this work, for all its strength and richness, and that brings it so close to us. For, after all, this fundamental doubt is the same doubt that is hidden in every love and that gives it its tenderest vibration.
This ignorance, acknowledged in such simple terms, moves us because it is the other side of a certainty we also share. The service of man cannot be separated from an ambiguity that must be maintained in order to preserve the movement of history. From this come the two pieces of advice that Antoine bequeaths to Jean-Paul. The first is one of prudent liberty, assumed as a duty. “Don’t let yourself be tied down to a party. Feeling your way in the dark is no joke. But it is a lesser evil” The other is to trust oneself in taking risks: to keep going forward, in the midst of others, along the same path that crowds of men have followed for centuries, in the nighttime of the species, marching and stumbling toward a future that they cannot conceive.
Clearly, there are no certainties offered here. And yet this work communicates courage and a strange faith. To wager, as Antoine does, over and above doubts and disasters, on the human adventure, amounts in the end to praising life, which is terrible and irreplaceable. The Thibault family’s fierce attachment to life is the very force that inspires the whole work. Father Thibault dying takes on an exemplary quality; he refuses to disappear, comes unexpectedly to life again, lunges at the enemy, struggles physically against death, bringing nurses and relatives into the fray.
Inevitably, we are reminded of the Karamazovs’ love of life and pleasure, of Dimitri’s despairing remark, “I love life too much. It’s even disgusting.” But life is not polite, as Dimitri is well aware. In this great struggle to escape by any and every means from annihilation lies the truth of history and its progress, of the mind and all its works.
Here indeed is one of those works conceived in the refusal to despair. This refusal, this inconsolable attachment to men and the world, explains the roughness and the tenderness of Martin du Gard’s books. Squat, heavy with the weight of flesh in ecstasy and humiliation, they are still sticky with the life that has given them birth. But, at the same time, a vast indulgence runs through all their cruelties, transfiguring and alleviating them.
“A human life,” writes Antoine, “is always broader than we realize.” However low and evil it may be, a life always holds in some hidden corner enough qualities for us to understand and forgive. There is not one of the characters in this great fresco, not even the hypocritical Christian bourgeois who is painted for us in the darkest colors, who goes without his moment of grace. Perhaps, in Martin du Gard’s eyes, the only guilty person is the one who refuses life or condemns people.
The key words, the final secrets, are not in man’s possession. But man nevertheless keeps the power to judge and to absolve. Here lies the profound secret of art, which always makes it useless as propaganda or hatred, and which, for example, prevents Martin du Gard from depicting a young follower of Maurras except with sympathy and generosity. Like any authentic creator, Martin du Gard forgives all his characters. The true artist, although his life may consist mostly of struggles, has no enemy.
The final word that can be said about this work thus remains the one that it has been difficult to use about a writer since the death of Tolstoi: goodness. Even then I must make it clear that I am not talking about the screen of goodness that hides false artists from the eyes of the world while at the same time hiding the world from them.
Martin du Gard himself has defined a certain type of bourgeois virtue as the absence of the energy necessary to do evil. What we are concerned with here is a particularly lucid virtue, which absolves the good man because of his weaknesses, the evil man because of his generous impulses, and both of them together because of their passionate
