America as Frankenstein
The Twenty-fifth Hour.
by C. Virgil Gheorghiu.
Knopf. 404 pp. $3.50.
The Twenty-fifth Hour comes to America heralded by a considerable European fame. This must be a result of the theme of the novel, its pretension, its vast gesture; it is not justified by what the book achieves.
The book begins as a realistic novel in the author’s native Rumania; there, in the description of rugged peasant life, Gheorghiu is at his best. Johann Moritz, the peasant from Fontana, has a strength and innocence which are believable. His mother, Aristitza, is a figure of flesh and blood. The other principal characters, Alexandra Koruga, the Orthodox priest; Trajan Koruga, his novelist son; and Eleanora West, Trajan’s wife, are not. They are wonderfully noble, wonderfully intellectual beings who from the first chapter on know everything, lecture each other and everybody else about Technological Civilization, Russia, Asia, America, the machine, the East, the West, quote T. S. Eliot and Count Keyserling, say long prayers by W. H. Auden which they seem to have memorized. Early in the book we learn that Trajan Koruga is working on a novel, The Twenty-fifth Hour, in which he will show that we have become the slaves of our slaves, the machines, that Technological Civilization is doomed and mankind beyond salvation. What happens to Trajan later can hardly surprise him or the reader, since it is the same thing that happens in the novel he is writing—a romantic trick that was a little stale when Gide used it in The Counterfeiters. And, to make absolutely sure that we understand the novel’s title correctly, the Hungarian foreign minister, when asked by his son what time it is, answers significantly:
‘It is twenty-five o’clock.’—‘I don’t understand,’ said Lucian.—‘I can well believe it. No one wants to understand. It is the twenty-fifth hour—the “now” of European civilization.’
Arthur Koestler’s influence on Gheorghiu is unmistakable, especially in his torture scenes. There is also the influence of certain classical writers, especially Voltaire. Johann Moritz experiences the blessings of the 20th century with entire innocence and ignorance, as Candide did those of the 18th. As in Candide, Gheorghiu’s figures meet time and again, under the most unbelievable circumstances. The dead reappear; the older Koruga, executed but not quite killed by the Bolsheviks, is revived—characteristically by the civilized and humane German army—so that he can meet his son and his former servant, Johann, in an American prison camp, and the again. The utterly improbable is legitimate in Voltaire’s symbolic puppet show; in a realistic novel one does not quite know what to do with it.
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The adventures of Johann Moritz make up one of the central stories of the novel. He is sent to a labor camp in Rumania through the malice of a local gendarme, and through a misunderstanding is declared a Jew. He escapes to Hungary, is arrested and maltreated as a Rumanian spy, then sold to the Nazis as a slave laborer. In Germany he is forced to join the SS because of his “Nordic” looks, just in time to be captured by the Americans, who try him as a Nazi war criminal. He is released after thirteen years in Europe’s concentration camps and prisons, but is presently rearrested as an Iron Curtain alien when the United States goes to war against Russia. Finally, he is allowed to join the volunteers who fight with the Americans against Communism and does so, but without enthusiasm, for by now he knows the world. The story of Johann Moritz is the most Voltairean, the most imaginative of the book. Moritz never lectures; things merely happen to him.
Unfortunately, the author was more interested in Trajan Koruga, who is a kind of idealized Virgil Gheorghiu: a Rumanian writer-diplomat who marries an intellectual Jewish lady and is therefore forced to leave Rumania. He manages for a while to keep his diplomatic job in Yugoslavia until the pro-German Croats intern him; is then swept into Czechoslovakia whence he flees westward with his wife to escape from the Russians and to meet the Americans. This brings us to the climax of the book, the real “twenty-fifth hour.” The Americans treat Trajan and his wife not as friends but as Rumanian enemy aliens, and imprison them.
Perhaps I have become insensitive, but I find this rather trivial. It is the kind of stupidity inevitable in wartime; annoying for those to whom it happens but not to be inflated into a disaster of metaphysical proportions. Nor is it peculiar to the “twenty-fifth hour.” When war broke out between Britain and France in 1804, Napoleon had all English tourists on French soil arrested without caring in the least whether they were pro- or anti-French at heart; and kept them, not for a few months, but for fully ten years. This reviewer happens to know a man—as a matter of fact, he knows him rather well—who got the bad idea of going to France during the “phony war” to join the French army. The French received him exactly as Major Brown receives Trajan Koruga (he had been born in Germany); this seemed to my friend idiotic, but not really of overwhelming significance, and after a few months he was released. So, it would seem, was Virgil Gheorghiu. The hero of The Twenty-fifth Hour cannot be released because he goes on a hunger strike and later—in an indirect way—commits suicide, not without some tearful monologues about Technological Civilization, the death of Europe, and his eyeglasses which remain his only property and through which he has already seen too much, far too much.
Modest in its true scope, the episode has to be adorned with all kinds of additional horrors, simplifications, and exaggerations. All American officers are good-for-nothings. The first, Major Brown, is an irascible and treacherous pedant without any understanding of Balkan politics. The second is a smug black-marketeer. The third, a Jew, insults Eleanora as a Nazi because she comes from Rumania.
Speaking of Jews, one cannot say they play a fortunate role in Mr. Gheorghiu’s novel. There is Dr. Abramovici who flees with Moritz from Rumania to Budapest, then deserts him rather meanly to return to Germany as a pompous American army officer, delighting in the intricacies of military bureaucracy. There is Strul, another Jewish co-sufferer in Hungary, who does not want to recognize Moritz when he meets him again in American uniform. And there is Marcou Goldenberg, the intellectual Jew from Fontana, who is a vicious Communist from the start, commits murder in the Rumanian internment camp, is liberated by the Russians, and presently establishes a monstrous regime of terror and killing in his home village. Even that may have happened, once: the question is whether it is typical enough to find place in a novel. Perhaps the author wanted to show that Jews are caught in the trap of Technological Civilization as Gentiles are and that they are neither worse nor better than Gentiles. Perhaps he has tried just a little too hard.
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The main issue of the novel is “Western Technological Civilization,” of which both Russia and the United States are instrumentalities. As Eleanora Koruga explains to Lieutenant Lewis in one of her last lectures: “Russia, since the Communist Revolution, has become the most advanced branch of Western Technological Civilization. It has taken up all the theories of the West and put them into practice.” The Third World War, then, is “a clash between two categories of robots, each dragging in its wake a trail of slaves of flesh and blood.”
But this is only one aspect of the matter. In the second half of the book, after the Korugas meet Major Brown, a somewhat different issue comes more and more into focus: the cultural and psychological differences, indeed the conflict, between America and Europe. The “epilogue,” placed after the beginning of the Third World War, is almost dominated by it.
“Lieutenant Lewis rubbed his hands. ‘ . . . Victory is already ours. The whole world will be civilized. There will be no more wars, only progress, prosperity, and comfort.’ Nora smiled.”
It is the bitter smile of cultured, human, knowing, and desperate Europe which is faced with the brutal, ignorant optimism of the American robot man. Shortly before, the Lieutenant, straddling his chair, a cigarette dangling from his lips, had asked Eleonora to marry him and Trajan’s widow had refused because of their difference of age. Not personal age—she is a year younger than he is; but, you see, Europe is so much older than America. How could a woman who has been loved by Petrarch and Goethe and Byron and Pushkin, who has seen knights and troubadours kneeling before her, take seriously the robot man’s insolent proposal? It is an effective scene; but the effect, like most of the novel’s effects, is reached with cheap, self-defeating means. Self-defeating—for if this is one of Europe’s great novels, gravely discussed at the Sorbonne, if this artless confusion of styles, this monotony of horrors, these crude exaggerations, these naively didactic perorations, do really satisfy the European literary taste, then Europe’s culture, to say the least, is not so very superior to the American.
The psychological relations between the new American super-power and the ancient and proud but terribly weakened nations of Europe are bound to be delicate at best. The traditional simplification of American foreign policy may help little to improve them. But exactly because the problem is both vital and delicate it should not be dealt with in a caricaturing, demagogic fashion. Lieutenant Lewis makes Eleonora’s European superiority all too obvious, all too easily won.
Too obvious, too easy—that is the failure of The Twenty-fifth Hour. Virgil Gheorghiu may not be lacking in good will or in industry. But he has chosen a very great subject matter; and a great subject takes a great writer. Our modern age has not yet the historical reality which springs from a long past: that undoubted continuity which made it possible to describe the society of Balzac’s France or to parody the society of Gogol’s Russia. Things without precedent, without name, have happened and are happening; extremes of crime and stupidity from which good writers are tempted to turn away because they have nothing useful to say about them. Still, we have other direct attempts to spell out the full experience of the 1940’s; to compare them with The Twenty-fifth Hour would be a lack of charity.
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