Bass Solo

THE SONG OF THE WORLD -- Jean Giono -- Viking ($2.50).

"The present time disgusts me, even to describe. It is sufficient merely to endure it." Thus spake, not James Branch Cabell nor Herbert Hoover, but one Jean Giono. Up to last week French Author Giono was practically unknown to U. S. readers. With the publication of The Song of the World he became a writer who should, and probably will, be known much better. A robust romantic who has been compared to Homer, Walt Whitman and D. H. Lawrence, Jean Giono writes with an earthly smack and tang that urban readers will find especially appetizing. Obviously not a great book, The Song of the World is just as obviously a work of great talent. A modern anomaly, it is French but romantic, sensual but serious.

Laid in an unspecified time (there are shotguns and gendarmes but no mention of railroads, automobiles or telephones), in an unspecified place (that bears some resemblance to Author Giono's own country, the foothills of the French Alps), the story tells of peasants whom time has never modernized, whose mountains, forest and farmland are as wide as the world. Antonio, a fisherman, lives by himself on an island in the river. In the forest nearby live old Sailor, his wife and his son's widow. Sailor's only remaining son, called the Twin, has gone far up the river to cut logs, float them down on a raft. When months pass and the Twin does not return, Sailor comes to Antonio for help. Together they set off to look for the lost son.

In the unknown country beyond the river's gorges they find a blind woman in the throes of childbirth. At the house to which they carry her they pick up the first trace of the Twin's trail; as they travel on, luck and sharp ears bring them all the answers they are looking for. The Twin is still alive, but the whole country side is after him. All the land thereabouts is dominated by one Maudru, breeder of bulls, a proud, autocratic man. The Twin has not only fallen in love with Maudru's only daughter but quarreled with Maudru's nephew over her, shot the nephew and carried off the girl. Antonio and Sailor finally discover the runaway couple hidden away in the house of a healer. Winter shuts in and holds them all there. Maudru has kept the police out of the affair by swearing that his nephew's death was an accident; he means to take vengeance into his own hands.

News of the Twin's hideaway leaks out to Maudru's men, but because the refugees keep careful watch, never go out alone, nothing happens. Both sides wait for spring. Then one night old Sailor, out with Antonio for a long-deferred spree, is caught alone, stabbed to death. The Twin sets out singlehanded to avenge himself on Maudru, with Antonio's help raids the great Maudru farm, sets fire to every stable, the house itself, gets away scot-free. On the Twin's log raft they make their getaway down river, Maudru's daughter included.

A good third of The Song of the World is made up of descriptions of nature; but readers who automatically skip such passages may find their eyes arrested willy-nilly. Nature to Jean Giono is not a static stage-set but a legion of dynamic actors. His trees not only have their individual smells but their own voices; water is hard or soft like a hostile muscle or like friendly flesh; everything breathes and moves, lives and acts. Sample: "Flights of dead leaves were swept off by the rain. The woods were being stripped bare. Huge water-polished oaks emerged from the downpour with their gigantic black hands clenched in the rain. The muffled breath of the larch forests; the solemn chant of the fir-groves, whose dark corridors were stirred by the slightest wind; the hiccup of new springs gushing out amidst the pastures; the brooks licking the weeds with their greedy lapping tongues; the creaking of sick trees already bare and slowly cracking in two ; the hollow rumbling of the big river swelling down below in the shadows of the valley. . . ."

The Author was born (1895) of Italian parents in Manosque, a little village in the Basses-Alpes, and still lives there, with his wife, his mother and two children. He left high school at 14, went to work for a bank, left it for the War. The success of his first novel (1929) gave him sufficient confidence to become his own master, retire to his house, where he hung a sign on the doorknob: "J. Giono works in the mornings."

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