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Failure and Achievement. Thus at its eleventh volume Men of Good Will is a monumental failure. Like the Maginot Line itself, it seemed flawless on the blueprints. Like that triumph of engineering, it is full of trap doors and secret passages and it has room in it for an army which, however, might be more useful in the field. Readers may study it with something of the same interest with which the German General Staff and Foreign Office studied the archives of the French Intelligence, Finance Ministry and Foreign Office when they captured Paris. But few will read it for pleasure.
But if Men of Good Will fails as a novel, as an exemplification of Remains' philosophy it is an achievement.
Romains calls his philosophy unanism. An attempt to find a living and usable unity in the shattered, disunited, warring and unhappy modern world, unanism is a conscious decentralization of thought. By its terms (which Romains makes unnecessarily complicated), the old unities that once provided the cement of social life—the sovereign, the church, the family—had lost their power to give zest and meaning to the everyday doings of men.
A new unity was needed, and where was it to be found? The deep love for one's native country, to whose power in World War I all France gave eternal testimony, could not stand alone to justify the slaughter at Verdun. The old generous dream of a new world, where all would share alike in the abundance that all created—a dream born in the bloody gutters of Paris in the days of the guillotine—could not stand up against the ghastly reality of Bolshevism. The liberal hope of an intelligently adjusted international order of compromise and arbitration could not stand up against the expiring incompetence of the League of Nations. And each new vision of a world brotherhood was weighed down by the tragic fate of its predecessors.
To Romains much of the error lay in the antiquated habits of thought of men, who assumed the existence of unities in life (and made practical plans on this assumption) where, in fact, none existed. Novels that showed life revolving around a single character, he believed, contributed to the gigantic individualistic delusion.
Life does not revolve around the individual, said Jules Romains. His importance is rather his place in, and movement through, the cellular structure of contemporary society. Thus the story of Jerphanion coming to Paris was not his individual career, but his being, as one of the units, in the entity known as Paris, which was greater than the sum of its citizens.
In place of the old concept of character determining destiny, Remains therefore substituted the miscellaneous, accidental, casual, purposeless or only half-purposeful existence. Experience consisted of fugitive impressions, words overheard, scenes glimpsed. Men of Good Will succeeds in communicating what Remains wanted it to communicate: the density and complexity of the modern world. It fails to record its simplicities.
Individuals still suffer, fight, endure loneliness and the bitter failure of all this work in Remains' new novel form as they do in life, and as they always have in good fiction. But in Remains' book their triumphs and their tragedies are alike unmoving. Seen as mere units of the world in which they live, his people seem strangely alike, and strangely unlikable.