The Chipped Wall & Two Other Stories

Engrossing Hobby

NEW YORK TIMES

BY ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH

THE CHIPPED WALL By Juan Alonso

While the most sensational, though not most important, legal battle in modern publishing history occupies the headlines and the State Supreme Court (comment here on its implications seems superfluous and pointless, at least until there are some implications, until there are more public facts to go on, or some decision has been rendered)—while this is going on, it is worth a reminder that other interesting books are still being written and produced, even some that have nothing to do with President Kennedy or his family.

One of the most interesting of these is an unusual first novel by Juan Alonso, a 30 year-old Argentinean, who lives in this country and teaches Spanish and Latin American literature at Tufts. “The Chipped Wall” is an unusual novel on two counts: it breaks new ground, slightly away from what we think of as traditional fiction; and it is published by a tiny one-man press in Cambridge, Mass.

The Novel Is Not Dead Yet

The implications here are manifest—among them, the novel, as a viable literary form, isn’t quite dead yet; small, independent quality publishing is still possible. (This seems particularly appropriate to note in view of the recent death, at 51, of Alan Swallow, America’s best known pocket publisher.)

“The Chipped Wall” is an extremely short, extremely compressed novel, which attempts to create no illusion of traditional fictional “reality,” but which operates instead in a manner akin to poetry. It is written in the form of letters between two old friends, René and Perry—yet there is no attempt to make the letters convincingly distinctive, or to “round out” the characters or to provide more than the most essential background.

T here is a story—in fact, a gripping story, with build-up, suspense and concentrated impact—but it acts as the supporting wire of the novel, the structure of which the author has elsewhere likened to a mobile; the letters and the characters, all facets of a single identity, are the weights and counter- weights. A metaphysical muchness, one may say; surprisingly, and with stunning simplicity, it works.

Identity—more specifically, the search for a conscious and coherent identity that is also morally supportable—is the theme of “The Chipped Wall” and René’s “engrossing hobby.” René’s problem, why he searches, is that he feels that he had his one moment of true identity in a seaside Spanish town thirty years before, and that that was the moment he should have died. Since then, he has become a revered poet, intellectual and Lecturer (with a capital “L”; it is the face of the admired, compromising Lecturer, that he hates the Lecturer who, he feels, has usurped his other, authentic self). All this he writes from Paris to his friend Perry, who is vacationing with his adolescent son and daughter, water babies both, in the Spanish town of René’s ecstatic moment.

His Moment of Truth

Gradually, what happened back in 1936 is revealed. René, then known as Renato, took part in a brief but bloody local Republican uprising against the newly arrived Fascist garrison. T he uprising was provoked by a rape and inspired by the town’s star Republican Loyalist; but it was doomed to be short-lived, and immediately after being instrumental in the gunning down of the last soldier, René left. T hat gunning, against a white chipped wall, was René’s moment of truth; he felt himself on intimate with history, “a participant in mankind and in my own soul …”

Yet history and circumstances play tricks. After René left, the Facists returned and occupied the town from then on without incident. Moreover, the Inspiring Loyalist became, and remains, the town’s mayor and leading citizen, not in the least denigrated for having been a turncoat. And slowly, René discovers that even in his moment of truth he, too, was performing in a compromised role.

He compares himself to Cain, who was also “the moralist of the family.” “In the short run,” he writes agonizingly, “Renato felt he was rotten, but in the long run he was confident of being the absolute moral superior of [every- body]…T he issue never was what was right, but who won.” Thus René-Renato’s Spanish Civil War, which, in a return letter, Perry calls a “faith”— “so central to the culture that the culture seems to be continually at, coming from, or going to the celebration of a ritual Mass in its obeisance.”

The issues of “The Chipped Wall” are central ones of identity in modem, committed man—a balancing act (though self-awareness makes it more of an agony than an act) between loyalty and betrayal, courage and cowardice, pride and shame, final judgments and judgments that must be tentative or deferred, and the problem of the definition of the self, through a single act of “engagement” or through modifying circumstances and the amending perspectives of time,

T he answer—to the last, at least—comes through a sudden, climactic tragedy in which Perry’s son serves as a surrogate to René’s longed-for “authentic” self of 30 years before. It is not enough, this deeply felt, power- fully written novel says, to find an acceptable self and freeze it. It is not enough because it denies that which makes a man a man: his capacity to see and measure himself; first and finally, his gift and responsibility of con- sciousness.

The Chipped Wall is a short novel, intense…it glitters like a jewel, and its light comes from within.