Books: The Poet as Hero

HYPNOS WAKING (279 pp.)−Rene Char—Random House ($5).

Rene Char is a Frenchman with a great, hulking frame (6 ft. 3 in.) and a jaw like a duck press. By almost unanimous consent of his countrymen, he is the greatest French poet of his time. Existentialist Author Albert Camus spoke for the French intelligentsia when he saluted Char as “the great poet for whom we have been waiting.” But English-reading people must take a French poetic reputation, like the credentials of ambassadors, largely on trust. In this bilingual sampler of his work, U.S. readers will be able to decide for themselves that measure for measure −man matched with meter−Rene Char stands a tall man.

At first sight one may see little more than the sort of extravagance which, since Rimbaud, has haunted French poetry when it decides to break out of the straitjacket of French rationality. Private images seem to compete successfully with good sense. Yet the French is intoxicating to the ear −even to a merely Berlitz-trained ear. And while the English translations are often flat and sometimes incorrect, readers will find a good man in these pages, a man who wears the mask of language, not in order to hide his identity but to make plain his role in the tragedy.

Honor More. In the Byronic manner, Char’s life is part of his poetry. His first poems appeared in 1929 when he was 22. A slim volume titled Arsenal sold 26 copies; in his job as a whisky and champagne salesman, he had found less trouble disposing of his wares. Later he took over the family business (building supplies) in his native village near Avignon. It was the war that changed him from a drifter into a dedicated man, and how it happened is the subject of a diary he published under the pen name Hypnos (the god of sleep).

Hypnos was a nom de guerre before it became a nom de plume. Rene Char, a combat artilleryman in the defeated French armies of 1940, took to the hills above his village. There, as Hypnos, he led a band of guerrillas so bravely that later he received a commendation from General Eisenhower. His simple patriotism that puts country above home and family is expressed in one of his aphorisms: “Be married and not married to your house,” which expresses what 17th century Cavalier Poet Richard Lovelace said more fancifully: “I could not love thee, dear, so much, lov’d I not honor more.” Char’s diary, which forms the largest part of this volume, tells how the god of sleep was awakened. Before joining the resistance, Char writes of a friend−but also of himself−”he had been a carping, suspicious actor of his life, poisoned with insincerity. A sterile depression had, little by little, settled upon him. Now he is in love, he spends himself, he is committed, he goes naked, he is a challenger.”

Other parts of the diary record episodes in the war, seen as if by the brief, brilliant light of a phosphorous flare. A comrade dies before an SS firing squad; the Germans try to drive Hypnos’ detachment out of hiding by burning a forest; and, in a two-line episode, there is the soldier who, “between the two shots that decided his fate, had time to call a fly ‘Madam.’ “

But not all of the diary is nostalgic for the reassuring certainties of war, and not all the characters are heroes. One is “a desperate windbag, a fat infra-red.” Others are “slippery charlatans, . . . These cocks of the Void will crow in our ears, once the Liberation has come …” When the diary was published in 1946. it was like wine to the parched French mind. Through Char, the French could hear themselves speak again with gravity and pride.

Meteorology of Man. U.S. readers of his poems, as well as of the prose-poem diary, will find the usual French elegance with an extra dimension. Char is in a sense a nature poet, but unlike that English poet who was said to be “very good on the weather,” Char uses images of stormy nature to illustrate the meteorology of man. At his simplest and best, he haunts the ear like Blake’s Songs of Innocence.

Cold sister, grass of winter, Walking, I have seen you grow Taller than my enemies More green than my memories.

Blades of grass which “wound” the earth are a symbol of man’s condition.

On the heights of summer There the poet revolts, And from the fires of harvest Draws his torch and madness.

Summed up one French critic: “The sense of what is sacred in man is what exalts us in Char.”

Realistic Surrealist. France, which had made a poet of the hero, went on to make a hero of the poet. Today Char is lionized in the press as well as in the literary cafes. Poet W. H. Auden once remarked: “If ‘France’ did not rhyme with ‘la Resistance,’ French postwar poetry could not exist.” But unlike many French who sold their resistance prestige to postwar politics. Char has no political affiliations, lives like a middle-class merchant (he still runs the family business). Surrealist Char says realistically: “One cannot live by writing verse alone.” Nor did Char join the chorus of French intellectuals who regard Coca-Cola as the opium of the masses. He is unfashionably and stoutly pro-U.S., still proudly keeps Eisenhower’s citation.

For the U.S., and for Britain too, there may be a lesson in the honor France accords to Rene Char. Of the U.S.’s two greatest modern poets, one is an emigre, and the other is kept in an asylum. As for Britain, her shabby Abbey is full of poets greater than Char, but they must be safely dead to gain public acclaim.