Books: Minor Prophet

THAT DAY ALONE—Pierre van Paassen —Dial ($3.75).

It would not be out of character if Newshawk and Lecturer Pierre van Paas sen girded up his loins with a goatskin, brushed wild honeybees from a matted beard, strode through the streets of Manhattan (where he now lives) muttering: “Woe to her that is filthy and polluted! What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?” For this descendant of many Dutch Calvinist divines is something of a modern Zachariah, a minor social prophet in the line of Tolstoy, Strindberg, Shaw and Ibsen. Pierre van Paassen knows how to number the sins and sound the trump of doom so mellifluously that his first book, Days of Our Years, sold 300,000 copies. Advance sales of That Day Alone last week reached 40,000.

That Day Alone is another plangent blare, vibrantly sincere, full of acute social discernments, tremulous with human pity, and, like the works of many social seers, somewhat rambling. It includes: 1) Farewell to France, possibly the most subduedly ominous of the many firsthand reports of France on the eve of the debacle; 2) As Time One Day . . ., a resumption of van Paassen’s boyhood memories about the Dutch village of Gorcum, begun in Days of Our Years; 3) The New Order Comes to Gorcum, a vivid account of the coming of the Nazis; 4) In the Steps of the Sun, eleven true stories illustrating the general misery of the age in all parts of the globe; 5) Irrevocable Hours, sketches of Hitler, Mussolini, Hess, et al., including a rational argument that Hess is in England because Hitler sent him there; 6) The River Flows Home, a hortatory and prophetic essay suggesting the shape of things to come. Sample: “The tumult breaks out once more. A mob storms the Bastille and a king’s head rolls in the dust. Man will be happy yet. . . . You, too, workers of the world, in your slums and lightless factories, you will know the light. …”

For readers who are proof against van Paassen’s great lay sermons, his descriptions of collapsing France may well be the most exciting parts of his book. Van Paassen wandered in wartime Paris like a man in a city of tombs. He watched the mobile guards leave for the front: “Not a smile . . . not once a cheer.” “C’est bien morne,” said van Paassen aloud. “Non, monsieur” a Frenchman corrected him, “it is sinister.”

He heard the secret police demand the papers of a man who had called the army “a walking prison.” “I have no papers,” said the man, “I am the son of the Unknown Soldier!”

He talked to a beggar who said: “I take a supreme delight in watching the panic.”

“What panic?” asked van Paassen.

“What panic? The panic of the bourgeoisie, of course. . . . For years they knew that this would come. . . . They wanted to continue, to hang on to what they had, to their poor little, dirty, decrepit possessions, and survive . . . just sneak through for another generation. . . . The great whore is about to face judgment.”

“By judgment you mean Hitler?” asked van Paassen.

“No, not Monsieur Hitler. . . . Monsieur Hitler is just part of the combination. It’s the world that is cracking, our world. … Do you know why? It’s because of the worms, I mean people like me, the lice-covered malheureux, the syphilitic, tubercular garbage eaters, the great unwashed. It’s we who have gnawed away the substance. . . . We have been chewing at the pillars of society since the foundation of the world. . . . There is nothing beneath your feet, absolutely nothing. . . . Earthquakes are nothing compared with what old Europe is going to see.”

Pierre van Paassen understands that the dilemma of pur time, which enabled the Nazis to take power, which still keeps the democracies from fully effective action, is caused by the ideological bankruptcy of the right no more and no less than by the moral bankruptcy of the left. He seeks to by-pass this dilemma by an appeal to conscience, and the force of his fervors lies in part in this simplification. For as a social seer he is really only asking a question. It is as old as Adam and still unanswerable: “Where is thy brother Abel?”