Freethinker's Dilemma

JEAN BAROIS (365 pp.)--Roger Marfin du Gard--Viking ($3.50).

Jean Barois, atheist, cowers in the runaway carriage. Another vehicle looms ahead; a crash is inevitable. A low cry bursts from his lips: "Hail, Mary, full of grace . . ."

This comico-tragic instant brings to bear, like the point of a knife, the dilemma of 19th Century Jean Barois and the meaning of his story. It is the fulcrum of the cold, sharp "novel of ideas" which won Novelist Roger Martin du Gard his first critical respect when it was published in France in 1913. Martin du Gard went on to win a Nobel Prize (1937) for his masterwork, The Thibaults, a magnificent cycle of novels about French bourgeois life in the first two decades of the 20th Century.

No Answers. Novelist Martin du Gard, despite his real stature, has not attracted the audience he deserves, is still all but unknown in this country. The Thibaults, considered a modern classic in France, has had no great sale in the U.S. and Jean Barois, published here for the first time, may sell no better. Nonetheless, it is one of the most original novels, in theme and technique, to reach U.S. readers this year.

Jean Barois is the story of a young Roman Catholic intellectual who breaks with church and family, becomes a freethinker, wins a reputation as a progressive by pleading the cause of Dreyfus. Gradually (after his carriage accident) he becomes dissatisfied with materialist answers to matters of life & death, and in the end returns to the fold.

When first published, the book was mistaken by some for an ironic smirk at the church. A weary smile, at least, is there; Martin du Gard is, personally, an avowed atheist. But there is also a bored grin at the starry-eyed rationalism and humanism of the pre-carriage Barois. To Author Martin du Gard, there are no sure answers to anything, either in religion or irreligion. But most of the sting is taken out of his irony by the simple compassion for human beings that salves every page in the book.

The story moves rapidly, by short scenes; the scenes rapidly, by short speeches; the speeches are introduced, as in a play, by the name of the character, followed by a word or two indicating his manner. Explanatory passages are short. Such methods will annoy some readers, who will feel that they are not getting a book, but only the outline of one. In a sense, they will be right. The style of Jean Barois is only the skeleton of the method Martin du Gard fleshed out in The Thibaults, but it is made of good solid bones.

No Publicity. Martin du Gard began Jean Barois at 29, finished it three years later. After World War I, in which he had charge of an army truck corps, Martin du Gard conceived the idea of The Thibaults and reorganized his life to write it according to plan. The plan worked equally well on his country estate in Normandy or at his apartment in Nice. On Monday mornings he would disappear into his workroom; seldom reappear until Friday night.

Publicity became Martin du Card's obsessing dread. When he heard that he had won the Nobel Prize, he stuffed a suitcase, told his servants he was taking a trip, strode out the door of his Nice apartment. Late that night he slipped back in. For several days, while rumors spread that he had been murdered, Martin du Gard worked quietly at home.

His passion for seclusion is justified, he feels, because he works so hard. "My first phrase is always a monster .. . Everything has to be rewritten." Moreover, he says: "Write ... if you must, but for God's sake don't talk about it." For 20 years, Martin du Gard wrote and rewrote The Thibaults. Once he threw away a whole volume when he decided it would weaken the cycle. In 1940 the last volume, Epilogue was published.

Martin du Gard spent most of World War II in Nice. There, or on his Normandy estate, he still lives and works, "ensconced in his materialism," so his friend Andre Gide has said of him, "like a wild boar in its wallow." Now 68, he is busy on a new novel, which, as usual, he declines to discuss.

Still the studious observer of the dilemmas of life, the author of Jean Barois intends to remain true to his own modest self-definition: "An independent writer who . . . escaped the fascination of partisan ideologies, an investigator as objective as is humanly possible, as well as a novelist striving to express the tragic quality of individual lives."

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