A Tale of Two Absolutes

A FLASK FOR THE JOURNEY (307 pp.)--F. L Green--Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

Can man find freedom as long as he is moored to society by responsibilities and to fellow men by emotions? Or is it accessible only when he rips himself away from all human entanglements to burrow in the dark and secret catacombs of consciousness?

These are the knotted questions posed by F. L. Green, a gifted English novelist,* in the second of his nine novels to appear in this country. (Odd Man Out was the first.) A Flask for the Journey displays Green's novelistic technique to top advantage: his granite prose; his talent for evoking atmospheres of disturbed feeling, bloodshot with suspense and anxiety.

Solitary Solution. The book reports the life stories of two young drifters, Jack Kaspan and Jane Gellson. Kaspan recalls his months as a P.W. in Germany, where at first he tried desperately to escape. But he soon discovered that the only meaningful area of existence is man's inner, inviolate consciousness, in which the pleasures of self-absorption are unbounded. Subjected to six months' solitary confinement because of an early attempt to escape, Kaspan learned to live so completely in his interior self--where he "could reach frontiers of consciousness beyond the outermost limits of contemporary ideas"--that he begged his Nazi captors to let him remain in his solitary hole.

For he was now convinced that freedom is "an ideal which can only be experienced in the recesses of the mind . . . in the silence of the heart. . . . The only way to discover absolute freedom is to become a prisoner. Yield the whole of yourself to something that will circumscribe your life. Then you'll discover freedom. Moral, spiritual, physical. . . ."

Joint Bondage. Jane Gellson did not withdraw into herself; she lived by the usual patterns of society. As a result, she was sucked into increasingly impossible situations. A sensitive young man, Bernard Meddow, fell in love with her, attached himself to her like a pathetic puppy, and all she could offer him was a mild pity. For how could she tell this conventional young Englishman that she was already secretly married to a German whose whereabouts were unknown? Meddow, Jane and her husband all suffered because of the inevitable hurts of human dependence; each was an innocent victim of the other's needs. And so, suggests Green, are all other human beings who bind themselves in the chains of human relationships.

The novel drives this despondent dogma home with such fierce insistence that readers may need a few minutes' reflection to shake off its spell. But in the end, it will be seen that Green has trapped both Kaspan and Meddow in equally futile obsessions with absolutist quests--the one for absolute freedom and the other for absolute love.

*Not to be confused with Graham Greene, a more gifted English novelist.

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