Maumort Mounts the Moral Barricade

"There is no object so foul," Emerson says, "that intense light will not make it beautiful." This aphorism, reflecting the 19th century's core faith in progress and reason, could be the guiding premise behind Roger Martin du Gard's expansive novel, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. A memoir of the eponymous character, the novel is a testament to reflection and self-examination. Maumort, born in 1870 to an old landowning family in the Perche region of Northern France, strives to illuminate his past while his family estate serves as quarters for a Nazi regiment during the German occupation. Focusing the intense light of reason on the past, he tries--at times desperately--to find an explanation for the moral outrages of his time. With his classical education shaping his intellectual proclivities, he cannot shake the vestigial Enlightenment belief in an underlying order to a coherent universe. Maumort is a man of the 19th century trying to understand a chaotic and morally perverse modern world.

Martin du Gard wrote his book over a span of 17 years--from 1941 until his death in 1958--and believed it would be his masterpiece. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for his eight-volume novel Les Thibault, the story of two brothers--one a reckless adventurer, the other a sensible physician, during World War I. Du Gard stated often that Tolstoy was his greatest creditor; Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort displays the extent of this debt, with its high moral tone and extensive, incisive depictions of both country and city society. Despite this, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort at first seems a failed project.

The novel is radically unfinished; Maumort never gets past the narrative of his childhood and young adulthood. The defining events of his life--his career as a soldier and colonialist in Morocco, his reaction to the Dreyfus affair and the death of his father--are only alluded to. Had there been time enough, du Gard's work would have been a complete study of a man's life, an exhaustive critique of human limitation and liability. However, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is a testament to care. Du Gard took extreme pains to represent the times he wrote about. Trained as a historian, he filled his characterizations with verifiable facts, extensively researched the events he described, and carefully delved into the psyches of the pantheon of men and women he presents.

Extreme care was also taken in the assembly of the manuscript. Du Gard's editor, Andre Daspre, spent almost 20 years assembling nearly two decades of the author's notes. About a third of the book is a collation of these notes--ranging from complete episodes and analyses, to the bare structural outlines of proposed plot, to a section entitled "The Black Box:," a compendium of aphorisms, inspirations and notes on his work. Though the disjunction between du Gard's clear and disarming prose and these scattered fragments at first is disarming, the tone never changes. Accustomed to following Maumort's (and du Gard's) scrutiny of his life, the reader only takes one step to reconstruct and assemble a life from these remnants. Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort was also a labor of love for its translators. Luc Brebion and Timothy Crouse spent seven years in consultation with Andre Daspre in preparing their excellent rendition of du Gard's work, and its publication in English marks the first complete translation available of the novel.

The intense regard for detail and the relentless probing of recollection in the novel has led it to sustain comparisons to Proust. Unlike Swann, the ultimate pretender, Maumort strives to be true to himself, to make his decisions lucidly and to eschew disordered thought. He laments the rare instances where his recollection reveals that his motivations were not as definite as he sensed they were. He lingers over the decisions he makes in his life, wavering, but exquisitely aware of his equivocations. Whenever possible, he takes both roads at once, for example in his choice of careers. Driven by his distant but august father to pursue a military career, but convinced of his destiny as a poet, he prepares both for the military and for a degree in literature. As a result of this, he only becomes a Lieutenant-Colonel in his professional life, a life of action, and achieves nothing as a scholar, his life of contemplation.

With a modernist's practiced candor, Maumort discloses the most intimate details of his adolescent sexual desires, but yet there is necessarily something he holds back in his revelations. It is crucial to Maumort's project of self-revelation that he lingers on the intimate details of his sexuality; for him, private life is indissoluble from the secrets of sexual desire. And so it makes sense that during these very disclosures, we see the limitations of Maumort as a man. It seems as though he never is compelled to ask himself, do I dare? During his explorations of homosexuality at boarding school, he never fully reciprocates, but enjoys his pleasure. In his university years in Paris, he spends two fruitless years trying to lose his virginity by chasing after prostitutes, but never brings himself to complete the act. His first love affair with the Martiniqueian DouDou is fully in her control.

Maumort cut his teeth on algebra, on ideas of scientific progress, on the rules of Greek grammar. In his efforts to account for the events of his life, he spends long passages analyzing the people who were important to him, sounding their virtues and explicating their faults, with deliberately objective scrutiny. He tries to account for every failing, to explore the plausibility of every belief, and his memoirs read almost as a series of complete and independent episodes. Even when he describes the Nazi officials that use his home as a barracks for their squadron, he tries to transcend his liberal prejudices against these bigoted fascists in order to discover the tenability and integrity of their system of belief.

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is tantalizing, but not satisfying. It leaves one with a fascination for what it could have become, with thrilling speculations.