Defeat of an Individualist

THE CENTURY WAS YOUNG--Louis Aragon--Duell, Sloan & Pearce($2.75).

This long, bitter, muscular novel, by the bitter author of The Bells of Basel and Residential Quarter, Louis Aragon--onetime Dadaist ringleader, left-wing journalist, soldier of World Wars I and II--begins in a false brightness: In 1889 a tremulous dream of hope hung over the world, a miracle world of science, progress, peace. Of course there was always a spatter of gunfire somewhere far off, faint rumbles and stenches from below. But people hoped that all the remaining corruption and debris would be swept away in the magic fin de siecle, that the birth of a new century would be a cleansing and a rebirth for man.

In Paris the dream was epitomized by an Exposition, with cascading fountains, noise, crowds, smells and especially the Eiffel Tower. Ugly no doubt, the Tower was a staggering prodigy of science. When its garland of lights went on at night, Pierre Mercadier murmured: "The Fairy Electricity." Pierre had put on his light-colored bowler and taken his pretty, featherbrained wife to the fair. Paulette thought it was dreadful.

Despite his perfunctory tribute to electricity, Pierre Mercadier did not really have confidence in progress or even in social stability. He was an egoist, individualist, amoralist--a sort of living symptom of creeping social sickness. He had a sizable fortune from his father, but taught history in the provinces to make a little extra. Pierre himself gambled in the stockmarket, but he was no wizard. He lost money.

He had a love affair which ended bruisingly. He had insomnia. He worried about his money. His humdrum associates, his stupid wife, his monotonous life suffocated him. Gasping for freedom and solitude, he decided to seize them forthrightly, converted all his securities into cash and disappeared.

Ten years later he was back in Paris, empty of purse and broken in health. An old friend got him a job in a school where the food was scanty, his room an unheated garret. No longer free, he could no longer endure solitude. In the end he was horribly captured by a crazy old brothel madam who conceived for him a pure, discarnate love, and he died a clinically brutal death.

Though Pierre Mercadier is the central figure of this book, the broad current of Aragon's story flows over and around him through four generations, with the steady popping of political and social disturbances in the background. Coincidence and the bedroom are in constant use. Aragon has a flair for the ironic or cruel anticlimax, for impaling passing figures on needle-pointed paragraphs.

The character he approves of is a burly bootmaker with a fierce pride in his own dignity, who works hard to support his wretched family in a hovel, and who joins a union promptly after his new employers have told him not to.

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