(2 of 3)
They live the life of exiles, lonely, with almost no mail and no contact with readers, with an occasional visit to a nightclub, a frequent afternoon horseback ride in Chapultepec Park, with almost no social life and with the unremitting hunger for intellectual companionship that lives with exiles like an uninvited guest.
The Book. The 59 chapters that make up the two parts of Work and Play are slower going than the previous books. The France that they describe has come out of World War I without knowing how deeply its strength has been sapped. In some ways it is healthier: the vice and crime that Romains described as characteristic of prewar France is now hidden or distant. The high-minded liberal intellectuals talk vaguely of Russia. The relaxations are banal. The moneymaking is easy, and tiresome. The love affairs and divorces are equally casual. The French suffer from the delusion that the Third Republic is running Europe. They patronize the English, deplore U.S. blindness in keeping out of the League of Nations, wonder if a standing army of 650,000 will be too big. Some familiar characters appear:
Jerphanion, now vice president of the Radical-Socialist Party. He delivers a long, dull speech (which Romains unblushingly describes as "great"). With an ex-diplomat he investigates a death among the mountain people of his native province—a death which might be from hard conditions of life in a snowbound farmhouse without medical aid, or might be murder.
Haverkamp. He is still making millions, and looks back with relish on his rise from a poor real-estate speculator to financier. In Work and Play he sets about divorcing his wife (and ex-secretary). He also gets mixed up, to his embarrassment, with architects, interior decorators and his private secretary, backs a play for his mistress and tries to hire politically ambitious Jerphanion as his secretary.
Laulerque. The old disillusioned conspirator who tried to make a secret international order work for the common good is embarrassed at Jerphanion's tentative project for a new secret society that would have liberal aims, honest methods and yet be as effective as the Communists.
Work and Play seems as exhausted as France. The conflicts are spiritless, the dialogues read like editorials, the goings-on of all the characters, with no one of whom the reader feels akin, seem meaningless. The pathos of the novel is extraneous. It lies in the reader's dark foreknowledge of what was so soon to happen to this France that Remains describes. All these picnics, love affairs, speeches, quarrels, schemes, crimes, recollections, arguments about the future, projects for preventing war—this, Romains seems to say, was he best that French intelligence was doing. Few of the actions were bad. Most of them were well-intentioned. It was not treachery, viciousness, wickedness, nor even laziness that stifled them. It was simply indecision, confusion, uncertainty, lack of friends, lack of leadership, and the willingness to blame others for the plight of France which resulted from more causes than any Frenchman knew.