Liana

THOUGH it develops in the comparative vacuum of a French colony in the Caribbean, this story is one for this moment, for it deals with the awful contradictions of our society even as it unites to level them.

ON the lovely island of St. Boniface, remote from the geography of this war, a wealthy Frenchman appropriates a young mulatto girl, named Liana, first as mistress, later, Out of a kind of spite, as wife. A youthful schoolmaster, refugee from France, enters this household, and for Liana, in this fortress of fear and humiliation, there arises an idyl of trust and of love. For his own pleasure and to dispel his own loneliness, each man irrevocably closes the door for Liana upon any but the life they choose to give her. One through money, the other through love, accustoms her to the life of a white woman. They engage her loveliness and her life. And then they destroy her absolutely and altogether.

For these white men finally accept the world as it is, a society by and for their own class, their own color. Such are the social barriers that even the schoolmaster, rendering his services to the cause of Free France, cannot integrate his love for Liana with his patriotism. Even if he could carry both in his heart and in his life, in the end he does not really want to. The best he can do is to turn away sorrowfully from the happiness he has shared and the tragedy he has helped to build. How cunningly the mind, even a sensitive mind, rationalizes its own and society’s contradiction; when it does so in the act of patriotism, the measure of irony overflows. To have meaning now, patriotism among democracies compels men to fight for their country not only for what it has been and is, but for a future in which such a story as this will not have to be told. Scribner, $2.50.

LUCY TOMPKINS