Novelist's Tricks

PITY FOR WOMEN--Henry de Montherlant--Knopf ($2.75).

The novels of Henry de Montherlant are characterized by a strange air of scatterbrained earnestness. One of the wittiest of modern French writers, he gets his effects, like an accomplished sleight-of-hand artist, by looking in the wrong direction, delivering little sermons about this and that, suddenly popping out with his tricks already worked. Because of this stealthy way of sneaking up on a story, his characters sometimes seem less like human beings than like rabbits pulled out of a hat, blinking uncomfortably at their sudden appearance.

In Pity for Women, to tell the love story of worldly, malicious, 34-year-old Pierre Costals and pretty, innocent, 21-year-old Solange Dandillot. Author de Montherlant begins by giving pages of letters written to Costals, a successful novelist, by his feminine admirers. He writes a lugubrious essay on matrimonial advertisements (''Behind every one of these advertisements a face, a body, an unknown something that, after all, may well be a heart!").

Even after Solange has been introduced, and her love affair is approaching a climax, de Montherlant stops the story to write a leisurely essay on happiness. Men, he says, have a negative conception of happiness. But "a woman will say to you that she is happy as she will say to you that she is warm or cold. 'What are you thinking?' 'That I am happy.' ... A woman who is happy and loved (and who loves) asks for nothing more. A man who loves and is loved needs something else as well. . . . Man seldom feels anything but desire for woman, and that woman cannot bear. Woman seldom feels anything but tenderness for man, and that man cannot bear. . . ."

With their attention distracted by Author de Montherlant's byplay, readers may not notice how shrewdly his characters are drawn. A libertine, indulgent, temperamental, Costals undertakes the amorous education of Solange with a patience that astonishes even himself. He raves about her legs, her eyes, her hair, her ears, her wrist watch, her vaccination marks, her manners and the fact that she does not read his novels, "When she blows her little nose," he exclaims, "it's always behind a newspaper (moderate in its views) so that I shan't see her do anything so low."

At the same time Costals tries to cure provincial, affected Andree Hacquebaut of her love for him, insults her, tears up her letters, considers pushing her under a passing automobile, and almost walks the legs off her when she visits him in Paris. Although he gets Solange, and gets Andree, both triumphs cost so much misery that even male readers are to have a low opinion of Costals by the time wins them. Their opinion might be even lower, Author de Montherlant implies, were they unable to find comparable cruelty somewhere in the history of their own love affairs.

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