THE CRITICS ON "ARCH OF TRIUMPH"

Critical reaction to Arch of Triumph, number one this week on the bestseller list, was generally positive in 1946 but not unanimously so. Even critics who praised the novel pointed out the sentimentality and artificiality of the plot and worried that some of the situations involving operations, prostitutes and abortion might be too lurid for many readers. And almost no one, it seemed, liked Joan Madou, Remarque's amoral and desperate heroine.

According to his biographers, Erich Maria Remarque was sensitive to critical reaction to his novels. He wanted to be accepted as a serious writer by the great names in German literature whom he admired and in many cases knew, but he also wanted to be a commercial success. His peers among the wartime emigres would not forgive his popularity and largely dismissed him as a writer of slick magazine fiction rather than a serious artist. It did not help his reputation among them that his novels were serialized in popular mass market magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Colliers or that they were adapted into Hollywood films.

Many of his fellow writers had known him in Berlin. He had come to the city from the provinces in 1925 as an associate editor of an illustrated sports magazine. Unlike most of the literati, he was not from a haute bourgeois family. He had not attended an elite gymnasium or a noted university. Nor was he one of the New Men idealized by the left, a proud member of the working class who wrote from a proletarian, Marxist perspective. Rather he was that other sort of New Man, the kind whom the sophisticates branded as social climbing parvenus. He was the son of a bookbinder, born and raised in a small provincial town and educated at a Catholic teachers college. He was nakedly ambitious. He was a clothes horse and often sported a monocle during the Berlin years. He and his wife at that time were flagrantly promiscuous. He appeared pretentious to many of his peers. He had changed his name from Remark to its original French spelling, added the middle name Maria and then purchased a title from an impoverished nobleman, although he seemed to have quickly seen this as a mistake. He was a playboy who courted beautiful actresses, drank heavily and raced sports cars. He was not political and before achieving fame had worked for a right-wing nationalist publisher who used his magazines to promote Hitler and the National Socialists. While the literary elite begrudgingly admitted that All Quiet on the Western Front was an achievement, some criticized its simple prose style, much admired by others, and pointed out the potboiler plots and sentimentality of Remarque's follow-up novels in which, it seemed, the heroine was always doomed.

Remarque was more respected by the literary establishment outside his homeland and most of the reviewers were impressed by "Arch of Triumph." Orville Prescott of The New York Times was among the most laudatory. He wrote in the daily paper that Arch of Triumph was Remarque's "most mature and thoughtful, his most deftly contrived and his saddest. It is also completely engrossing and often unashamedly flamboyant and theatrical." Prescott acknowledged flaws, including the unsympathetic heroine, the excessive hospital scenes, the VD exams and depictions of vice. Overall, he believed the novel could have done with some tightening, but it was good enough, in his opinion, for him to include it innhis end of the year ten best list.

Charles Poore reviewed the novel for The New York Times Book Review on Sunday. His critique was generally positive but he expressed more reservations than his colleague. "It makes absorbing reading," he wrote, "though it is sometimes overcontrived; it is briskly paced, though the lacquered writing lacks the simple spontaneity of All Quiet on the Western Front." He complimented Remarque for his effort to render "the look, smell and substance" of pre-war Paris but felt that the vivid picture presented unfairly caricatured the city's inhabitants in a stereotypical way. He faulted Remarque for choosing theatricality over credibility but conceded that this might have been necessary to capture the attention of readers who otherwise would have been bored with the oft-told story of the suffering of the refugees.

The review in The New Yorker was from associate editor and novelist Hamilton Basso rather than the magazine's chief literary critic, Edmund Wilson. Basso wrote that Arch of Triumph was the "first novel I have read with sustained interest in quite some time." He noted that there had been a flood of recent books on the wartime refugees but felt that Remarque made readers forget that they were in a world of cliche. He praised the strong narrative drive but wrote that it was the fascinating characters who made the book. Remarque's bed-hopping heroine, who seemed to him to have stepped out of a Hemingway novel, was for him the exception. In February, Wolcott Gibbs wrote a parody of the novel in The New Yorker. In his version a screenwriter named Aspic has been driven from Hollywood by the studio powers into the life of a hunted animal. He is forced to teach English as an unlicensed substitute to young women at the Brearly School. Gibbs skewered Remarque's borrowings from Hemingway as well as his lapses into long-winded, banal, pseudo-profundities.

Other critical reactions at the time:

• Robert Pick, Saturday Review: "One of those rare books fated for the best seller list that will at the same time move and satisfy more serious adult readers."

• Edward Weeks, Atlantic Monthly, found the writing powerful and praised the character touches but thought that some of the details were sordid and the mood of loneliness was wearying. The dialogue occasionally droned on, he wrote.

• Ann Freemantle in the liberal Catholic Commonweal noted the novel's classic and orderly style while the conservative Catholic World thought it to be a "nauseating hodgepodge of atheism and gross immorality."

• The trade publication Kirkus called the novel "superb" but warned that many readers might find the situations "unpalatable." The Christian Science Monitor concurred, finding the novel moving but filled with unpleasant, disreputable characters and situations.

• Diana Trilling, establishing her reputation as the grande dame of modernism, wrote in The Nation that the novel was "not uninteresting" and had a serious, decent intention but was not "up to the moral and intellectual tone of this period of tragedy." It certainly was not, she sniffed, the monumental work it was being presented as.

• Richard Plant of The New Republic was one of the very few critics who found the novel hard to read, although he felt it had something to say. Plant was himself a refugee from Germany who later would write about the plight of gays under the Nazis.

• Lewis Gannett of the Herald Tribune was quoted in the ads as finding it "a swift-moving, full-blooded story" that had "a scope, a vision of a world and a craftsmanship in detail rare in the contemporary novel."

• John Beercroft in Wings, the book review of the Literary Guild, said it was "magnificent" but "not a book for squeamish sensibilities" although "adults will find it a tumultuous and scathing work." The publisher was happy enough with this assessment to use it in their ads.

• The Time magazine review cited the novel's compassion and expert craftsmanship. "The story of the emigres succeeds because of its tough, bold, unsentimental treatment of vast pathos." However, "the love story fails because Joan, an unpleasant character at best, is never quite real."