roaring whores) 'Heaven is made for you'—and the Belgian ten-foot farmer spat three times and wiped them with his foot, his nose dripping; and the nigger shot a white oyster into a far-off scarlet handkerchief—and the priest's strings came untied and he sidled crablike down the steps—the two candles wiggle a strenuous softness . . .
"In another chapter I will tell you about the nigger.
"And another Sunday I saw three tiny old females stumble forward, three very formerly and even once bonnets perched upon three wizened skulls, and flop clumsily before the priest, and take the wafer hungrily into their leathery faces."
This sort of thing knocks literature into a cocked hat. It has the raucous directness of a song and dance act in cheap vaudeville, the willingness to go the limit in expression and emotion of a negro dancing. And in this mode, nearer the conventions of speech than those of books, in a style infinitely swift and crisply flexible, an individual not ashamed of his loves and hates, great or trivial, has expressed a bit of the underside of History with indelible vividness.
The material itself, of course, is superb. The Concentration Camp at La Ferté-Macé was one of those many fantastic crossroads of men's lives where one lingered for unforgetable moments, reaching them one hardly knew how, shoved away from them as mysteriously by some movement of the pawns on the chessboard, during the fearfully actual nightmare of war. A desperate recklessness in the air made every moment, every intonation snatched from the fates of absolute importance. In The Wanderer and Jean le Negre and Surplice and Mexique and Apollyon and the Machine Fixer and in those grotesque incidents of the fight with the stovepipes and Celina's defiance we have that intense momentary flare in which lifetimes, generations are made manifest. To have made those moments permanent on a printed page is no common achievement.
For some reason there is a crispness and accuracy about these transcripts of the smell and taste and shiver of that great room full of huddled prisoners that makes me think of Defoe. In The Journal of the Plague Year or in the description of a night spent among enormous bones and skeletons in the desert journey in Captain Singleton one finds passages of a dry definiteness that somehow give the sort of impression that gives this hotly imaged picture of a roadside crucifix:
