Books: Surefire

PROUD DESTINY (625 pp.) — Lion Feuchtwanger—Viking ($3.50).

This is another novel whose success is as predictable as next year’s Democratic majority in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Screen rights to this novel of 18th Century France sold for $350,000 last May; it is the Literary Guild choice for October, and thus sure of sales in the hundreds of thousands. To these rewards, critical acclaim is not likely to be added on the same scale. Proud Destiny resembles War and Peace in the general aim of treating great events (in this case France’s part in the American Revolution) in terms of the people who enact or suffer them. The resemblance does not go much beyond that.

A first-rate historical novel represents a strong and magical act of imagination: a great deal of learning may have gone into it, but the scaffolding has then been removed. Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius put the reader in the presence of the past; Proud Destiny puts before him only popularized history.

Period Sets. Sixty-three-year-old Lion Feuchtwanger is a professional hand at this and a capable one. Writing in pre-Hitler Germany, he used medieval material in The Ugly Duchess, 18th Century Germany in Power (his first U.S. success), 1st Century Rome in his Josephus trilogy. He has worked on Proud Destiny in Santa Monica, where he settled after fleeing Europe in 1940, and the novel smells faintly of the Hollywood atmosphere in which it was composed. The period sets are painstaking, the main characters are photogenic. With no strain on his attention, the reader can savor from one large dish a thousand tidbits of 18th Century custom & morality that he would otherwise have to root for in the garden of biography and memoirs.

The two principal and contrasting figures are the French adventurer and comedy writer, Beaumarchais (he wrote The Barber of Seville), who procured arms for the Continental Army, and the 71-year-old sage, Benjamin Franklin, first Minister to France. Feuchtwanger does best at picturing Franklin’s patient and crafty life in the grassy suburb of Passy, writing and printing his bagatelles of satire on his own hand press, enjoying his hot bath in a lidded tub of his own design (on which visitors could sit while he soaked), gravely carrying on his gallantries with French women and using his popularity to best advantage for his country.

By comparison, the character of Beaumarchais remains a paper doll. So do most of Feuchtwanger’s supporting players: the pretty Hapsburg queen, Marie Antoinette, with her “Lilac Coterie” of expensive courtiers; the fat and timorous king, who hated rebels on principle; and various noblemen, courtesans, and intriguers of Versailles. The dying Voltaire comes up from Ferney to see his play, Irene, and to give Feuchtwanger a crack at him, too.

Pretty Whims. The destiny of the young republic, by Feuchtwanger’s account, turned as much on the personal interplay between these characters as on General Washington or the Continental Congress. Without Beaumarchais’ stubborn vanity and romantic ambition, the revolting colonies might not have armed the troops that forced the British surrender at Saratoga. Without that victory, Franklin’s mission might have failed. Even with that victory, says Feuchtwanger, Franklin owed his success less to the wisdom of French policy than to a whim of Antoinette. It will probably be news to paid-up members of the D.A.R. that so much of the American Revolution was won on the playing fields of a Versailles boudoir.