Prizewinner

Eleven years ago a few U. S. readers paid $5 for copies of a two-volume novel translated from the French, forbiddingly titled The Thibaults. Its little-known writer was Roger Martin du Gard. The imposing boxed edition was made to look even less exciting by quotations from reviews that compared the book vaguely to the works of Balzac, Romain Rolland and Marcel Proust. Martin du Gard, said the New York Herald Tribune loftily, "reconciles at once the fastidious preciosity of Proust and Rolland's passionate evangelism with the traditional body of art." In a year when best sellers included Sorrell and Son, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Beau Geste, Martin du Gard's masterpiece was so thumping a publishing failure that the subsequent volumes were not translated.

One result was that U. S. readers missed some excellent fiction and were taken by surprise when Roger Martin du Gard won the 1937 Nobel Prize for literature, which usually amounts to around $40,000, announced fortnight ago. In France seven of the projected ten novels of the cycle have been published, carrying the story to the outbreak of the War. Although they centre around the wealthy Thibault family, they have little in common with the long, naturalistic family chronicles, of which Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks is the prime example, that have become familiar to U. S. readers. Nor do they resemble Jules Remains' many-volume Men of Good Will. Main difference is that Martin du Gard avoids detailed accounts of the social and economic background, tells his story in succinct, dramatic scenes. Suggestive, lucid, ironic. The Thibaults is written with a restraint that reminds some French critics of Flaubert, with a serenity of tone that is extraordinary in a period of impassioned argumentative prose.

The first novel, The Gray Notebook, begins when pious, portly Widower Oscar-Marie Thibault discovers that his 14-year-old son Jacques has run away from home after getting mixed up in a scandal at school. Guiltless of anything worse than writing high-flown, affectionate, freethinking notes to a young Protestant, young Jacques flees to Marseille with his easy-going friend Daniel, paces the streets and broods about right and wrong while Daniel is befriended by a warm-hearted girl who solves some moral problems for him without a moment's thought.

In the second book, The Penitentiary, emphasis shifts to Jacques' older brother, Antoine, a young doctor, who is determined to get Jacques out of the reformatory where his father has put him. Third book, The Springtime of Life, shows Jacques' rehabilitation under Antoine's mixed affectionate and exasperated guidance, his falling in love with Daniel's sister Jenny. Later books describe Jacques' second disappearance. Antoine's second discovery of him after he has written autobiographical novels under another name, and has become a revolutionist.

The tone of The Thibaults changes from volume to volume. The third is light, graceful, amusing, takes place in a lovely summer world of warm nights, music, long walks along sandy paths; the seventh, L'Ete 1914, laid on the eve of the War, is ominous, melodramatic, the tempo heightening as Jacques races around Europe in a desperate effort to unite the revolutionary movement against the War. The Thi-baults is filled with unexpected transitions. Even French novelists, who traditionally excel at pictures of young love, can whistle with admiration at Martin du Card's half-funny, half-poignant story of blundering Jacques and Jenny, which is all the more effective because of contrasting scenes that show Antoine's involvement with a Proustian female whose underworld past he is slow in finding out.

The Author, Born in 1881, Roger Martin du Gard got his diploma from l'Ecole des Chartres at 25, started the next year writing "a long, very long novel" called The Life of a Saint, gave it up, published his short Devenir in 1909, started another long novel which he also abandoned. A slow writer, he worked three years on Jean Barois, a novel about the Dreyfus case, followed it with a farce, spent four years in the army during the War and began what he describes as "a long, a very long, an excessively long novel," The Thibaults, in 1920. Calm, reticent, ironic. Martin du Gard lives in the country, sees few friends (Andre Gide is one), likes few writers (Tolstoy and Dostoievsky are exceptions), is so conscientious that he card-indexed the lives of all members of the imaginary Thibault family before he began to write. He was traveling when the Nobel Prize was announced, and for several days his family. not knowing how to locate him, doubted that he knew he had won it.

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