Books: Words in a Sentence

THEN SHALL THE DUST RETURN—Julian Green—Harper ($2.50).

In this book Paris-born American Julian Green, now an expatriate in the U.S., publishes a novel which is very possibly the last he will ever write on what is his home soil—a novel which takes him mentally into a new land of mysticism.

Like Henry James and T. S. Eliot, both more English than birth could have made them, Julian Green is a natural Frenchman. For most of his life France was his chosen home and French the language in which he chose to write his dark, elegantly fashioned, dreamlike novels (The Dark Journey, The Closed Garden, Avarice House), his rich-minded Personal Record (TIME, Nov. 13, 1939).

In Personal Record Green speaks of his difficulties in writing this new book (in French, of course; it is translated by his old friend James Whitall). He speaks also, and more often, of his gravitation toward Oriental mysticism. “Our lives can be explained only if they are related to those that precede them and to those that follow them, like the words of a long sentence, the whole meaning of which is known only to God.”

Then Shall the Dust Return is Green’s attempt to clarify the shape and meaning of such a sentence. Its theme is transmigration, or, from another standpoint, human destiny. It is a strange, scrupulous, uneasy piece of work; small wonder that he was troubled in the making of it.

It is told in three stories, centuries apart, linked in mystical fashion by a small article of jewelry, a black, glittering chain which was “forged in the fires of human selfishness.” This chain is a symbol likewise of the sea.

In the first story it is cast up at the feet of a Welsh child named Hoöl. Under its influence Hoöl dreams of its fateful past and of his own future. He loses it to the sea, spends a life in Sweden in venery, musicianship, the service of a fiend. This section is straight fable, some of it exquisite, some of it embarrassing, from sober Julian Green, as a Hamlet trying to play Falstaff.

The second story takes place in Arras in the 16th Century. Those whom the chain involves this time are a father and his daughter, for whom he suffers the tortures of love as she approaches maturity.

In the third story, also in Arras, in the early 1900s, the powers of hell appear chiefly to be represented by a provincial middle-class family whose unexcited, excellent life resolves a millennium of frustrations beginning with Hoöl.

In many of its correspondences, dreams, and borderland apprehensions of a bottomless past, this book has the gooseflesh resonance of a well-made poem, full of dim, sentient suggestions of a religious fatality. Its whole treatment is somber, muted, ardent. As a confused, cryptic painting—a portrait of a personal absorption rather than a public communication —it is moving. Yet, within its arbitrary framework, it convincingly clarifies nothing about destiny.