Books: Down with Duck Ponds

REDEMPTION (249 pp.)—Francis Stuart —Devin-Adair ($3).

Irish Novelist Francis Stuart spent World War II in Germany by choice. Restless and bored with Ireland, at 37, he had accepted a job teaching English literature at the University of Berlin, and stuck it out. Stuart was not the only rebellious Irishman in town. Among his good friends were the Republican army leaders who felt sure they were riding the wave of the future. Gradually the wave ebbed and the certainty faded. Says a leaner, greyer Novelist Stuart, who now lives in Paris by choice: “Who could have suspected in 1939 that things would turn out the way they did?”

With such reflections in his head, Francis Stuart has been reconsidering the life & times of himself and his I.R.A. friends. Redemption, a feverish search for a new “breadth of understanding,” is the product of that reconsideration. Though written in the overwrought, pseudo-prophetic manner of D. H. Lawrence’s later novels, it is a fascinating book. Its central character, a tempest-tossed Irishman named Ezra Arrigho, has spent the war in Germany and has just returned to Ireland to settle down in a little town. What can he say of it? Scornfully, Ezra decides that most of its people live dull, stagnant lives in little duck ponds while secretly hoping for “miracle, excitement and sensation.”

Such beliefs lead him to take an indulgent view of Kavanagh, a lusty fishmonger who has murdered a servant girl in a swirl of passion. They also lead Ezra to seduce Romilly, the sister of his friend Father Mellowes, simply because he wants to “wipe some of that look of innocence off her face.” In long conversations, Ezra and Father Mellowes conclude that the greatest human sin is indifference and that Christ “liked anyone who let themselves be carried away.”

Having reduced Christianity to nothing more than enthusiasm, they readily accept Kavanagh as their companion and approve of Romilly’s decision to marry him so that the murderer’s last days in prison will be a bit less lonely.

Redemption is marred by the Dostoevskian notion that a true spiritual rebirth can come only after a great sin; consequently, its characters hazily confuse forgiveness of Kavanagh’s crime with left-handed apologies for it. When a policeman speaks with horror of Kavanagh’s “cold knife,” Father Mellowes blandly replies that the knife “was not so cold as your justice”—which seems to suggest that, for Stuart, morality can be measured with a thermometer. Like his character, Ezra, Stuart wants brotherhood but in a typically Irish mood has no good word for humility. If men can find grace somewhere between Ezra’s spiritual sensationalism and Kavanagh’s spiritual sloth, they will not learn it here.