Victors & Vanquished

GENERATION WITHOUT FAREWELL (300 pp.)--Kay Boyle--Knopf ($3.95).

Only a decade after the period it describes, Kay Boyle's latest novel wears the mustiness of history. She is telling about the U.S. occupation of Germany in 1948: what the occupiers were like, how the occupied saw them, what chances decent, imaginative people found of bridging the gap between victors and vanquished. Author Boyle, a resident of postwar Germany, writes with her usual intensity and better-than-average documentation. And she can see straight to where it is uncomfortable for most people to look--into their own natures.

The situation seems almost routine. Colonel Roberts, the post commander in Fahrbach, is Regular Army, a martinet, a bit contemptuous of the defeated, none too pleased about U.S. efforts to rehabilitate the Nazi mind. His sensitive wife Catherine has long since lived in another world, where human spirit reaches human spirit through some sixth sense that easily transcends differences created by war or nationality. Milly, his teen-age daughter, is so far out in soul land that daddy scarcely knows her. Mamma quickly falls for an impoverished German newspaperman who fought with Rommel and spent two years as a prisoner of war in Colorado. Milly is even more gone on a young German groom. The cast is filled out by a black-marketeering PX manager, a handsome, weak-spined staff lieutenant, and a young U.S. civilian who runs the local America House and hopes to show that the best of the U.S. soul echoes the best of the German.

Author Boyle gets all these people down with a luminous directness that few writers can match. Her brief views of German life and her cameralike shots of war's destruction will make veterans realize what they only half saw when they were there. But with her poet's range and passion, she overshoots, as she usually has, the human mark. Her Germans are more credible than her own countrymen. The colonel is harshly drawn in a reasonably fair picture, but Milly and Catherine both lack reality. And who can believe that the kind of people described in this novel ever speak with the tongues of poets and philosophers about their love affairs, their hopes and aspirations for humanity?

Where Author Boyle does succeed is in her unerring demonstration of how difficult it is for conqueror and conquered to meet at any level below the let's-get-along surface. And she can suggest, rather than tiresomely explain, that history and national character are still tragically more decisive than any common love for the good, the true and the beautiful.

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