Uranus

National Review, Oct 7, 1991 by John Simon

MARCEL AYME (1902-1967) may not have been one of the greatest French writers of this century, but he certainly was one of the most diverse, most prolific, and most charming. He wrote in every genre from fiction to poetry, essay to children's fantasy, drama to jounalism. Some of his novels, stories, and plays are very near top-grade, and there was always, even in his harshest works, a lightness of touch, a floating irony that was Ayme's hallmark, and very probably one reason for his not being more widely appreciated. The other was that, though never an actual Nazi or Petainist, Ayme did contribute to some Vichy jounals during the Occupation, and was friends with such fascist writers as Celine and the very gifted Robert Brasillach, the only major talent executed after the war, despite efforts by Ayme and others to save him.

Ayme was never even tried after the Liberation, which suggests that the case against him could not have been strong. As for his strong talent, it can be approximately described as lying at the juncture of Jean Anouilh and Colette, if those two could be said to intersect. Ayme had the discrimination to reject membership in the French Academy, and the courage to publish as early as 1948 a novel, Uranus, whose subject is the question of guilt and innocence during the Occupation. It is an ironic assessment of the self-righteous meting out of "justice" by people who, under the best of circumstances, would not have been qualified to cast stones, but who under the worst ones, in 1945 France, used the cloak of justice to hide a cloaca of the basest motives.

Claude Berri's movie version of Uranus, written with his sister, Arlette Langmann, is, on the whole, a faithful adaptation, departing from the novel in only two major ways. It does not go into the most bestial horrors perpetrated on the collaborators, and it does not get inside the collaborator Maxime Loin, around whom the story revolves. Ayme neither justifies nor excuses him, but movingly explains him, thus making a case, not for clemency, but for retribution less extreme than the firing squad. There is also a third, less obvious but even more important, difference: the movie fudges the implication of universal guilt, the omnipresent suggestion that nobody is without taint.

In the small village of Blemont, partly destroyed by American bombs (another detail glossed over), people made homeless have been billeted with those whose homes have been spared; the result is not only overcrowding but also grating juxtaposition, where ideologies collide and hatreds flare up. Thus the local factory's chief engineer, Archambaud, who lives with his overripe bourgeoise wife, his pretty but somewhat flighty daughter, Marie-Anne, 18, and his younger son, Pierre, has been saddled with the Gaigneux family. Gaigneux is a lower-level employee of the same factory, the village's leading Communist, and has a pugnacious wife as well as a band of small, squalling brats. Gaigneux, like most men, hankers for Marie-Anne, and tries to keep peace between his defiant wife and sniffy Mme. Archambaud, who have turned the shared kitchen into a battleground. Also assigned to the apartment is the merry widower Watrin, the high-school lit. teacher ( in the book, it's math), an incurable optimist who insists on perceiving the world as beautiful, and man as the fairest thing in it, his evil deeds only "less good"--even the concentration camps merely "pranks and turbulences."

If Watrin is a Pangloss, he is nevertheless no fool. He accuses other people, justly but ever so gently, of the useful flaw of hypocrisy, and loves rain almost as much as sunshine as he glories in a world that includes the wonder of dragonflies and elephants. His glorifying, though, is hard-earned. At 11:15 on the night of the bombardment, he had been reading a book on astronomy, and had just reached a passage about "the dark, icy planet Uranus" when all hell broke loose. He managed to sleep through some of it, but woke up in the morning in a house reduced to rubble except for a bit of second-story floor on which his bed miraculously survived. Since then, every night at 11:15, he must, with "the infinitesimal light" of his being, fight Uranus, this "crushing mass of blackness and negativity, of desolation and despair." And every morning he wakes to renewed joy and confidence.

One dark night the collaborationist Maxime Loin, hunted everywhere, sprouts up before the rather ordinary Archambaud and begs for asylum--life. Archambaud takes him into the three rooms left to him, though he doesn't like him, and makes him share the bed of son Pierre, who detests him. The danger of discovery by the Gaigneux, and other Communists who keep calling on them, is great. Meanwhile an innocent party gets into trouble because of Loin: Leopold, the owner of a popular local cafe. He is a former strongman and current alcoholic, whom we see in a very Gallicly bittersweet scene reproaching his wife, Andrea, for getting old and ugly, while he, thanks to his modest daily ration of 12 litres of white wine and the discovery of poetry,k has stayed young. For, the village school having been razed in the bombing, classes have been reassigned to cafes during their off hours. From behind the bar, Leopold has listened to Watrim teaching such masterpieces as Andromaque, and feels another Racine stirring inside himself. He stumbles on an accidental Alexandre in his utterance--a perfectly ludicrous one that he thinks magnificent--and forthwith, working out the scansion on his fingers, finds himself in dogged pursuit of a rhyming second. Eventually, he hopes to have ten, thirty, fifty, and then . .