Books: Cold Times Are Coming

THE AGE OF THE FISH—Odon von Horvath—Dial ($2).

For 37 years Odon von Horvath lived in the shadow of a huge, sinister, apparently dead but always growing tree—the German State. He was born in 1901 in what was then Serbia, where his father served in the Austro-Hungarian embassy. He was educated in Budapest. During his adolescence the German tree trunk burned itself hollow with war.

Afterwards, young von Horvath tossed his literary chestnuts into the hot ashes.

At first they came out beautifully—Max Reinhardt took to him, and when he was 27 one of his plays won the Kleist Prize (German counterpart of the Pulitzer Prize for drama)—but later his chestnuts be came .ashes, too. Not that he was perse cuted; he was 100% “Aryan.” But he feared the tree, for above its gutted trunk it was sprouting heavy Nazi foliage.

He went into self-imposed exile, but he never got out from under the shadow. On his travels he made friends with Stefan Zweig, Alfred Neumann, Franz Werfel, and wrote two first-class novels, Child of Our Time and The Age of the Fish. Last week the latter was published in English.

In short, sharply chiseled chapters, some of which are little essays on autocracy, some of which are so rhetorical that they scan even in translation, The Age of the Fish warns that the world is floating into cold times in which “the souls of men, my friend, will become as rigid as the face of a fish.” Its narrator is a young teacher, who learns that under the State he must criticize his pupils’ essays not for saying that Negroes are animals or that war is glorious, but only for having an untidy left margin or the word colonies mis spelled. At military camp one of his pupils is killed, and the causes and consequences of that death are grave indeed. But death, concludes the author, is better than life in such a world. When he reads about death in the papers, his mind cries out, “Too few are dead, too few.” He wishes he could die.

Not long after writing this book, Odon von Horvath was walking along the Champs Elysees in Paris. The usual crowd was all around him, straining against a high wind. It was June, and the trees were gay and green with their new foliage—except for one huge, dying chestnut tree. A sudden gust swept against it. It tottered, cracked, started to fall. Von Horvath, preoccupied, did not hear the people scream as he walked into its shadow. The dead tree crushed him dead, and Odon von Horvath had his wish.