Jean Giraudoux: Four Plays by Maurice Valency (review)

266 MODERN DRAMA February warning of the prose to come. Yoking Claudel and Sartre together under the heading of "Further Perils of Debate" is calculated only to enrage admirers of both, and citing Anouilh as a case of "Commercialism Reconsidered" is a cavalier misuse of language, since no COnsideration, original or subsequent, is referred to or undertaken. WILLIAM G. CLUBB JEAN GlRAUDOUX: FOUR PLAYS, adapted and with an introduction by Maurice Valency, New York, Hill and Wang, 1958,255 pp. Price $1.75. Suppose yourseH a jobless young girl to whom a shabby man confides the secret of success: tell every man how handsome he is. And suppose, even though you are innocent and a little afraid of men, that you attempt it. The shabby man proves to be Apollo, the artist's dalman, with whose aid Giraudoux teaches us how to live. In the Apollo of Bellac (1942), Agnes learns from Apollo that all men have their beauty: "All you have to do is to watch as they breathe and move their limbs. Each has his special grace. His beauty of body. The heavy ones-how powerfully they hold the ground! The light ones-how well they hang from the sky!" To apply this secret without abusing it, because you have some conviction of its truth, is to know the world, and knowing it, to accept seeming deformities that conceal harmonies. Giraudoux, the world-travelled diplomat, pours into the young girl the wisdom he has acquired, making her the vehicle of aspiration and practicality . Like the swain of the pastoral tradition, Giraudoux' young girl, critical of the world, complains, yet accepting it as it is, ends happily. In another play, a "piscatory eclogue," Ondine, a water goddess, abandons the sea for a human husband and finds a housewife's life attractive. \\-'hen she must return to the sea, Ondine says she will remember her house: "When I plunge to the bottom, I shall be going to the cellar-when I spring to the surface, I shall be going to the attic. I shall pass through doors in the water. I shall open windows." Like Agnes, Ondine accepts the world as it is, with its deceptions, its transient joys, and its infidelities. Sister of Agnes and Ondine, Isabel of the Enchanted seeks true love among the dead, suffers an interlude when her body is in perfect condition, but her spirit has left it. "To induce it to return," says the Doctor, who is rational in these irrational circumstances, "we must batter at the gate of death with the sounds of life." After being assailed by commonplace noises-girls reciting, card players exulting, a politician orating, and women chatting about "black lace petticoats lined with crimson satin"-Isabel, reviving, accepts the earth in spite of its faults. Always in Giraudoux the earth is paradise, if you make it so. Always the irrational is made rational: ghosts and gods teach us homely truths. In his last play Giraudoux used as his vehicle, not a girl, but a "rational" madwoman . Written during the German occupation, the Madwoman of Chaillot (1945) explores an evil worse than the pomposity and the false rationalism of the Enchanted (1933) or the frail human love that Giraudoux tolerated in Ondine ( 1939). The power-hungry Financier will not let the Baron buy shoelaces from a peddler, who has ''his own clientele." Presidents, prospectors, and panderers of all fields of endeavor, and the women who stand powerfully behind them-these Giraudoux sends to a maze underground, allowing earth to be a paradise where "every plant . . . will be watered." Man has dignity without suffering. Faded beauties flower. A dramatist in his own right and a play-doctor for Broadway, Mr. Valency, who teaches both the Renaissance and Modem Drama courses in the graduate school of 1959 Boo:s:REvmws Columbia University, has tried to make these four plays "say in English what Giraudoux wished them to say in French"; his end, Mr. Valency adds, bas been "production on the American stage." Since comic drama on the American stage draws its idiom from G. B. Shaw and from dramatists like S. N. Behrman, these translations recall English and American comic classics rather...