THE INFERNO
BY HENRI BARBUSSE
AUTHOR OF "UNDER FIRE"
TRANSLATED FROM THE 100TH FRENCH EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY EDWARD J. O'BRIEN
1918
INTRODUCTION
In introducing M. Barbusse's most important book to a public already
familiar with "Under Fire," it seems well to point out the relation of
the author's philosophy to his own time, and the kinship of his art to
that of certain other contemporary French and English novelists.
"L'Enfer" has been more widely read and discussed in France than any
other realistic study since the days of Zola. The French sales of the
volume, in 1917 alone, exceeded a hundred thousand copies, a popularity
all the more remarkable from the fact that its appeal is based as much
on its philosophical substance as on the story which it tells.
Although M. Barbusse is one of the most distinguished contemporary
French writers of short stories, he has found in the novel form the
most fitting literary medium for the expression of his philosophy, and
it is to realism rather than romanticism that he turns for the
exposition of his special imaginative point of view. And yet this
statement seems to need some qualification. In his introduction to
"Pointed Roofs," by Dorothy Richardson, Mr. J.D. Beresford points out
that a new objective literary method is becoming general in which the
writer's strict detachment from his objective subject matter is united
to a tendency, impersonal, to be sure, to immerse himself in the life
surrounding his characters. Miss May Sinclair points out that writers
are beginning to take the complete plunge for the first time, and
instances as examples, not only the novels of Dorothy Richardson, but
those of James Joyce.
Now it is perfectly true that Miss Richardson and Mr. Joyce have
introduced this method into English fiction, and that Mr. Frank
Swinnerton has carried the method a step further in another direction,
but before these writers there was a precedent in France for this
method, of which perhaps the two chief exemplars were Jules Romains and
Henri Barbusse. Although the two writers have little else in common,
both are intensely conscious of the tremendous, if imponderable, impact
of elemental and universal forces upon personality, of the profound
modifications which natural and social environment unconsciously
impress upon the individual life, and of the continual interaction of
forces by which the course of life is changed more fundamentally than
by less imperceptible influences. Both M. Romains and M. Barbusse
perceive, as the fundamental factor influencing human life, the
contraction and expansion of physical and spiritual relationship, the
inevitable ebb and flow perceived by the poet who pointed out that we
cannot touch a flower without troubling of a star.
M. Romains has found his literary medium in what he calls unanimism.
While M. Barbusse would not claim to belong to the same school, and in
fact would appear on the surface to be at the opposite pole of life in
his philosophy, we shall find that his detachment, founded, though it
is, upon solitude, takes essentially the same account of outside forces
as the philosophy of M. Romains.
He perceives that each man is an island of illimitable forces apart
from his fellows, passionately eager to live his own life to the last
degree of self-fulfilment, but continually thwarted by nature and by
other men and women, until death interposes and sets the seal of
oblivion upon all that he has dreamed and sought.
And he has set himself the task of disengaging, as far as possible, the
purpose and hope of human life, of endeavouring to discover what
promise exists for the future and how this promise can be related to
the present, of marking the relationship between eternity and time, and
discovering, through the tragedies of birth, love, marriage, illness
and death, the ultimate possibility of human development and
fulfilment.
"The Inferno" is therefore a tragic book. But I think that the
attentive reader will find that the destructive criticism of M.
Barbusse, in so far as it is possible for him to agree with it, only
clears away the dead undergrowth which obscures the author's passionate
hope and belief in the future.
Although the action of this story is spiritual as well as physical, and
occupies less than a month of time, it is focussed intensely upon
reality. Everything that the author permits us to see and understand
is seen through a single point of life--a hole pierced in the wall
between two rooms of a grey Paris boarding house. The time is most
often twilight, with its romantic penumbra, darkening into the
obscurity of night by imperceptible degrees.
M. Barbusse has conceived the idea of making a man perceive the whole
spiritual tragedy of life through a cranny in the wall, and there is a
fine symbolism in this, as if he were vouchsafing us the opportunity to
perceive eternal things through the tiny crack which is all that is
revealed to us of infinity, so that the gates of Horn, darkened by our
human blindness, scarcely swing open before they close again.
The hero of this story has been dazzled by the flaming ramparts of the
world, so that eternity is only revealed to him in fiery glimpses that
shrivel him, and he is left in the dark void of time, clinging to a
dream which already begins to fail him.
And the significant thing about this book is that the final revelation
comes to him through the human voices of those who have suffered much,
because they have loved much, after his own daring intellectual flights
have failed him.
So this man who has confronted the greatest realities of life, enabled
to view them with the same objective detachment with which God sees
them, though without the divine knowledge which transmutes their
darkness, comes to learn that we carry all heaven and hell within
ourselves, and with a relentless insight, almost Lucretian in its
desperate intensity, he cries: "We are divinely alone, the heavens
have fallen on our heads." And he adds: "Here they will pass again,
day after day, year after year, all the prisoners of rooms will pass in
their kind of eternity. In the twilight when everything fades, they
will sit down near the light, in the room full of haloes; they will
drag themselves to the window's void. Their mouths will join and they
will grow tender. They will exchange a first or a last useless glance.
They will open their arms, they will caress each other. They will love
life and be afraid to disappear....
"I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things are to come.
Through me has passed, without staying me in my course, the Word which
does not lie, and which said over again, will satisfy."
Truly a great and pitiless book, but there is a cleansing wind running
through it, which sweeps away life's illusions, and leaves a new hope
for the future in our hearts.
EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.
BASS RIVER, MASS.,
July, 10, 1918.
CHAPTER I
The landlady, Madame Lemercier, left me alone in my room, after a short
speech impressing upon me all the material and moral advantages of the
Lemercier boarding-house.
I stopped in front of the glass, in the middle of the room in which I
was going to live for a while. I looked round the room and then at
myself.
The room was grey and had a dusty smell. I saw two chairs, one of
which held my valise, two narrow-backed armchairs with smeary
upholstery, a table with a piece of green felt set into the top, and an
oriental carpet with an arabesque pattern that fairly leaped to the
eye.
This particular room I had never seen before, but, oh, how familiar it
all was--that bed of imitation mahogany, that frigid toilet table, that
inevitable arrangement of the furniture, that emptiness within those
four walls.
The room was worn with use, as if an infinite number of people had
occupied it. The carpet was frayed from the door to the window--a path
trodden by a host of feet from day to day. The moulding, which I could
reach with my hands, was out of line and cracked, and the marble
mantelpiece had lost its sharp edges. Human contact wears things out
with disheartening slowness.
Things tarnish, too. Little by little, the ceiling had darkened like a
stormy sky. The places on the whitish woodwork and the pink wallpaper
that had been touched oftenest had become smudgy--the edge of the door,
the paint around the lock of the closet and the wall alongside the
window where one pulls the curtain cords. A whole world of human
beings had passed here like smoke, leaving nothing white but the
window.
And I? I am a man like every other man, just as that evening was like
every other evening.
. . . . .
I had been travelling since morning. Hurry, formalities, baggage, the
train, the whiff of different towns.
I fell into one of the armchairs. Everything became quieter and more
peaceful.
My coming from the country to stay in Paris for good marked an epoch in
my life. I had found a situation here in a bank. My days were to
change. It was because of this change that I got away from my usual
thoughts and turned to thoughts of myself.
I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen or
twenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insignificant.
I was unmarried. I had no children and shall have none. There are
moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will
end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity.
Was I happy? Yes, I had nothing to mourn or regret, I had no
complicated desires. Therefore, I was happy. I remembered that since
my childhood I had had spiritual illuminations, mystical emotions, a
morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I
had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think
that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become
submerged in the positive nothingness of every day.
. . . . .
There I was now in that room.
I leaned forward in my armchair to be nearer the glass, and I examined
myself carefully.
Rather short, with an air of reserve (although there are times when I
let myself go); quite correctly dressed; nothing to criticise and
nothing striking about my appearance.
I looked close at my eyes. They are green, though, oddly enough,
people usually take them for black.
I believed in many things in a confused sort of way, above all, in the
existence of God, if not in the dogmas of religion. However, I
thought, these last had advantages for poor people and for women, who
have less intellect than men.
As for philosophical discussions, I thought they are absolutely
useless. You cannot demonstrate or verify anything. What was truth,
anyway?
I had a sense of good and evil. I would not have committed an
indelicacy, even if certain of impunity. I would not have permitted
myself the slightest overstatement.
If everyone were like me, all would be well.
. . . . .
It was already late. I was not going to do anything. I remained
seated there, at the end of the day, opposite the looking-glass. In
the setting of the room that the twilight began to invade, I saw the
outline of my forehead, the oval of my face, and, under my blinking
eyelids, the gaze by which I enter into myself as into a tomb.
My tiredness, the gloominess (I heard rain outside), the darkness that
intensified my solitude and made me look larger, and then something
else, I knew not what, made me sad. It bored me to be sad. I shook
myself. What was the matter? Nothing. Only myself.
I have not always been alone in life as I was that evening. Love for
me had taken on the form and the being of my little Josette. We had
met long before, in the rear of the millinery shop in which she worked
at Tours. She had smiled at me with singular persistence, and I caught
her head in my hands, kissed her on the lips--and found out suddenly
that I loved her.
I no longer recall the strange bliss we felt when, we first embraced.
It is true, there are moments when I still desire her as madly as the
first time. This is so especially when she is away. When she is with
me, there are moments when she repels me.
We discovered each other in the holidays. The days when we shall see
each other again before we die--we could count them--if we dared.
To die! The idea of death is decidedly the most important of all
ideas. I should die some day. Had I ever thought of it? I reflected.
No, I had never thought of it. I could not. You can no more look
destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is
grey.
And night came, as every night will come, until the last one, which
will be too vast.
But all at once I jumped up and stood on my feet, reeling, my heart
throbbing like the fluttering of wings.
What was it? In the street a horn resounded, playing a hunting song.
Apparently some groom of a rich family, standing near the bar of a
tavern, with cheeks puffed out, mouth squeezed tight, and an air of
ferocity, astonishing and silencing his audience.
But the thing that so stirred me was not the mere blowing of a horn in
the city streets. I had been brought up in the country, and as a child
I used to hear that blast far in the distance, along the road to the
woods and the castle. The same air, the same thing exactly. How could
the two be so precisely alike?
And involuntarily my hand wavered to my heart.
Formerly--to-day--my life--my heart--myself! I thought of all this
suddenly, for no reason, as if I had gone mad.
. . . . .
My past--what had I ever made of myself? Nothing, and I was already on
the decline. Ah, because the refrain recalled the past, it seemed to
me as if it were all over with me, and I had not lived. And I had a
longing for a sort of lost paradise.
But of what avail to pray or rebel? I felt I had nothing more to
expect from life. Thenceforth, I should be neither happy nor unhappy.
I could not rise from the dead. I would grow old quietly, as quiet as
I was that day in the room where so many people had left their traces,
and yet no one had left his own traces.
This room--anywhere you turn, you find this room. It is the universal
room. You think it is closed. No, it is open to the four winds of
heaven. It is lost amid a host of similar rooms, like the light in the
sky, like one day amid the host of all other days, like my "I" amid a
host of other I's.
I, I! I saw nothing more now than the pallor of my face, with deep
orbits, buried in the twilight, and my mouth filled with a silence
which gently but surely stifles and destroys.
I raised myself on my elbow as on a clipped wing. I wished that
something partaking of the infinite would happen to me.
I had no genius, no mission to fulfil, no great heart to bestow. I had
nothing and I deserved nothing. But all the same I desired some sort
of reward.
Love. I dreamed of a unique, an unheard-of idyll with a woman far from
the one with whom I had hitherto lost all my time, a woman whose
features I did not see, but whose shadow I imagined beside my own as we
walked along the road together.
Something infinite, something new! A journey, an extraordinary journey
into which to throw myself headlong and bring variety into my life.
Luxurious, bustling departures surrounded by solicitous inferiors, a
lazy leaning back in railway trains that thunder along through wild
landscapes and past cities rising up and growing as if blown by the
wind.
Steamers, masts, orders given in barbarous tongues, landings on golden
quays, then strange, exotic faces in the sunlight, puzzlingly alike,
and monuments, familiar from pictures, which, in my tourist's pride,
seem to have come close to me.
My brain was empty, my heart arid. I had never found anything, not
even a friend. I was a poor man stranded for a day in a boarding-house
room where everybody comes and everybody goes. And yet I longed for
glory! For glory bound to me like a miraculous wound that I should
feel and everybody would talk about. I longed for a following of which
I should be the leader, my name acclaimed under the heavens like a new
clarion call.
But I felt my grandeur slip away. My childish imagination played in
vain with those boundless fancies. There was nothing more for me to
expect from life. There was only I, who, stripped by the night, rose
upward like a cry.
I could hardly see any more in the dark. I guessed at, rather than
saw, myself in the mirror. I had a realising sense of my weakness and
captivity. I held my hands out toward the window, my outstretched
fingers making them look like something torn. I lifted my face up to
the sky. I sank back and leaned on the bed, a huge object with a vague
human shape, like a corpse. God, I was lost! I prayed to Him to have
pity on me. I thought that I was wise and content with my lot. I had
said to myself that I was free from the instinct of theft. Alas, alas,
it was not true, since I longed to take everything that was not mine.