Books: Identifiable as Prose

THE BENEFACTOR by Susan Sontag. 274 pages. Farrar, Straus. $4.50.

Of what capital city in Europe is a beheaded man the patron saint? It is by such recondite clues that the reader comes to understand that the scene of Susan Sontag’s The Benefactor is, in fact, Paris. The publishers confirm this on the book jacket. “Identifiable as Paris” is the tentative concession, as if Farrar, Straus had only reached a majority decision on the issue.

The book proposes even stiffer puzzles. The hero is Hippolyte; why does he move about and mutter to himself like a heavy sleeper coming to the surface? Is he in a dream? The answer seems to be: yes, but half the time Hippolyte is supposed to be awake. Then the question arises why he should sound the same when he is dreaming and when he is awake, moving like a somnambulist about the vaguely identifiable landscape of “the capital.” Miss Sontag evidently has powerful convictions about dreams and offers many glum and portentous aphorisms on the subject, such as, “Dreams are the onanism of the spirit.” But the one thing everyone knows about dreams is that they are quite different from waking, and something is wrong if you can’t tell which is which. This elementary error—either factual or esthetic—is persisted in over 274 relentless pages.

In the course of these, the reader tentatively gathers that Hippolyte has been a student and saloniere in Paris, acted in films (he was a natural as Bluebeard’s confessor), acquired a mistress whom he arranges to have seduced by delivery boys and other women and whom he finally, in a scene rich in unconscious comedy, sells for 13,000 old francs to a merchant in Tangier. Then there is a wife; he seems to have some notion that he has murdered her. Has he or hasn’t he? By this time, the reader may feel that he has been trapped by a prodigious bore telling about a funny dream he had on the way to the club.

Hippolyte has a friend (in itself an unlikely story) who, we are asked to believe, is a writer of genius by day and an industrious male prostitute by night. Hippolyte and this man of many parts converse. Sample: Hippolyte: “You are a tourist of sensation.” Jean-Jacques: “Better than a taxidermist.”

All this is written in what would be identifiable as English prose if it did not sound so much like a blurred translation from some other language.