WORK AND PLAY (Books XXI and XXII of Men of Good Will)—Jules Romains—Knopf ($3).
In a modest apartment on the eleventh floor of the Latino-Americana apartments in Mexico City, Jules Romains is at work on the 13th volume of Men of Good Will. He has been writing his vast serial for 13 year. He writes in longhand on his mahogany desk in the combination dining and living room, his back to the window that overlooks Mexico City to the south and, beyond it, the mountain ranges hemming in the Valley of Mexico. For six or seven hours each day, he traces out the involved characters and the complicated situations of the giant novel that already runs to 5,822 printed pages.
Whatever final judgment is passed on Men of Good Will or its author, its plan, the way it was written, the view of life and fiction it embodies, are likely to stand as one of the incredible efforts of the human imagination. It is a one-man attempt to bring order into the fortress of confusion and agony that is modern Europe, to make its disasters intelligible and its political and philosophical incoherence understandable.
Ten-Year Plan. Romains is one of the most prolific of living writers. When he started writing Men of Good Will, he had already turned out many volumes—Death of a Nobody, which won sincere critical praise, popular plays on the level of Broadway thrillers, poems, esoteric novels, mildly erotic, but too keenly perceptive to be pornographic, expositions of his theory of unanimism, experiments in telepathy, in Extra-Retinal Vision. He was also a lecturer in philosophy, and a one-man conspiracy with hush-hush dealings with people like King Leopold of Belgium, General Gamelin, Premier Daladier, Otto Abetz, then Chief of Nazi Propagandist in France—under the delusion (as ingenuously described by him in his Seven Mysteries of Europe) that they were Men of Good Will.
A man of medium height, with dark straight hair, blue eyes, a lined humorous face and a big nose, Romains was 35 when he got the idea for Men of Good Will. For ten years he prepared to write it. He consciously planned his life and writing to climax in the creation of his masterpiece. In his country house in Touraine he worked ten hours a day for four months each year. In Paris, visitors, the mail and the telephone slowed him down. But he kept two secretaries busy. One of them was Lise Dreyfus, brown-eyed, slim, with brown curls piled high on her head, a Government civil servant who had studied in Germany, England and France. Eight years ago Romains married her. She says, "I became at once wife and secretary."
When the war began, Romains had finished eight volumes of his novel (16 in the French edition). Published in December 1939 was Verdun, a merciless account of World War I slaughter, and a harrowing picture of inhuman French officership.
Tragedy and Novelty. Through the months of the phony war Romains worked for the French Government. When France fell, Romains and his wife fled to the U.S. For 18 months they lived quietly in Manhattan, had no intimate friends except Refugee Stefan Zweig and his wife, whose suicide (TIME, March 2, 1942) was also a terrible tragedy to the Romains. In February 1942, Romains went to Mexico City to lecture at the National University. There the Romains stayed "because life is easier, cheaper and it is a new thing to know."