Dark Night of the Soul

BEASTS AND MEN (249 pp.)--Pierre Gascar--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.50).

The proper study of mankind may be man, but writers from Aesop to Kafka to Orwell have found animals just as instructive. The latest to scan human nature in the visage of the beast is French Author Pierre Gascar whose Beasts and Men was published as two separate books in France, one of which (Les Betes) unprecedentedly won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix des Critiques awards in 1953. Very much in the Kafka tradition, Author Gascar has put together in these short stories as mordant and bone-chilling a set of circumstances as modern literature has had to offer since Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, a tale of a timid salesman who woke one morning to find himself in the monstrous shape of a gigantic cockroach.

A Tale of Two Corpses. Gascar feels no need to transmogrify his humans into animals: World War II and its aftermath, the setting for most of the stories, has already reduced both species to a state of competitive coexistence. One story, The Animals, openly pits a band of starving Russian prisoners against a German circus menagerie, uprooted from its East Prussian winter quarters by a Russian offensive. Each morning the Russians line up at the barn door of their makeshift prison to watch the animal keeper toss scraps of meat to the ravenous lions, then slink back to their own mess tins of watery soup. Some new prisoners bring with them a cache of cigars--and the idea of bribing the keeper for the animals' rations. Soon the prisoners are eating not only the lions' meat but, somewhat guiltily, the peaceable bears' bread. Local German police officers get wind of the deal, shoot two of the

Russians as an example and announce that the animals will get double rations, the men none, for three days. At story's end, the prisoners are nudging one of their number forward past the two snow-shrouded bodies of their comrades to ask the animals' guard if he will trade the day's meat ration for the corpses.

Rat's Alley. In The Horses, a corporal named Peer helps care for 800 hunger-crazed horses. As he daily enters the stockade with his bag of oats, the milling, rearing horses snap at the feed and at him.

Peer flails at their forelegs, whips their nostrils bloody, pokes out their eyes as if lashing at the perpetual nightmare of the war and hoping in his "state of damnation ... to reveal the truth about this desolate world." Rarer than the power to shock is Author Gascar's power to evoke disgust, which he does by combining familiar objects in unfamiliar ways until they become surreal and emetic. In Gaston he describes a rat: "It looked rather like a great hairy carrot; it crouched there as all rats do, as soon as dusk has fallen and there is nothing to distinguish them from a lost slipper or a forgotten rag except that long worm lying along the floor . . . that suspicious-looking shoelace that will suddenly, swift as a whipped top, grow tense with terror." Gaston of the title is a black-spotted rat, as big as a rabbit, and he is stalked through the sewers of a French provincial town by the health board and its ratcatchers as assiduously as Melville's Ahab hunted the great white whale. Like Moby Dick, the great black rat is a symbol of evil and of an ambiguous enveloping doom far beyond the petty retribution of its death.

A Pocketful of Acorns. What that doom might be--a universal death for all mankind in a new war--Author Gascar hints at most movingly in his last and longest tale, The Season of the Dead. It is about the Nazi massacre of east European Jewry. The story is not new, but this is perhaps one of the rare times that a writer of fiction has taken it through the tunnel of horrors into the light of art.

Peter, a captured French soldier, and his buddy are allowed by the Germans to tend the graves of their fellow French in a bucolic cemetery on the outskirts of Brodno, Poland. Peter thinks of death as a quiet neighbor until the freight cars of ill-fated Jews rumble past and the calling and weeping of human voices is carried on the wind until it fades into the distance, "leaving behind it that same serene sky, that store of blue that bewildered birds and dying men can never exhaust."

Serene, too, is the German sentry: "I'm told it's with electricity or gas. Oh, they don't suffer anything." The trains roll on. Finally the Jews of Brodno go, all except one who lives in the trees by day, sleeps in one of Peter's empty graves by night, leaving him tiny scraps of messages ("They've killed them all, Peter, killed them all! What is loneliness?"). The last message Peter finds in the grave is not worded: it is a black jacket with a pocketful of acorns, and its owner is gone--to death or madness. Peter knows not.

The Cry of a Child. The dark night of the soul is a subject that comes naturally to Pierre Gascar. As a five-year prisoner of war, Gascar spent time in a brutal camp in the Polish Ukraine, where he tended graves like his hero Peter, and witnessed the killing of Jews. What Beasts and Men lacks, in the profoundest sense, is cosmic relief. In the despairing mind of Author Gascar, God cannot be forgiven for His sin of not existing. Gascar's notion of the universe as a giant rattrap leaves his characters with their necks perpetually broken, like the heroes of Dreiser and O'Neill, and with the same clenched fists of impotence raised against "dat ol' davil" Fate. This may not be the stuff of high tragedy, but it is rich in compassion for humanity's lot. He is one of those writers who, at their best, are touched with the defiance of Ivan Karamazov when he said that he rejected God and the universe if His order rested on the tortured cry of one innocent child.

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