Languages in Exile

Europe's new literary exiles -- like Voltaire and Rousseau in 18th-Century Switzerland and Holland -- now find in the U.S. a place to publish their works in their own languages. Since no new books are published in France of which the Nazis disapprove, the U.S. is the chief soil on which the French language sur vives as a free medium of expression.

Three new foreign-language publishing enterprises now active in the U.S.:

Editions de la Maison Franc,aise, in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, is run by a wispy, gentle, bespectacled little Frenchman named V. S. Crespin, who became a U.S. citizen in 1925. He set up a business importing new, old and rare books from France. One day after France's downfall Andre Maurois dropped in to see him with the manuscript of a new book, Tragedie en France. Of course Maurois could get it translated into English, but he would like also to publish it in the original. Then & there Crespin decided to start publishing books in French on U.S. soil.

Tragedie en France came out last November; by last week 17 others had been added to Crespin's list. Best-sellers are the Maurois book, 15,000 copies; Jules Romains's rather naive Sept Mysteres du Destin de l'Europe, 9,000; Jacques Maritain's A Travers le Desastre, 8,000; Robert Coffin's Le Roi des Beiges, atil Trahi?, 4,000. Scheduled for publication soon are books by Maritain (on Saint Paul), Emil Ludwig (on German history), Stefan Zweig (on Brazil). He has published new novels by Romains and Julian Green.

Livres Franc,ais is another series of French books, published by Brentano's.

Salient titles: Rene de Chambrun's De La Lorraine `a Washington; Laval, by Henri Torres, a French liberal lawyer who knew the No. 1 French Quisling intimately.

Brentano's best-seller (8,000 copies) shows that even in exile the French have not forgotten sex; it is Emigres de Luxe, a torrid tale of refugees in New York by Maurice Dekobra, worldly wise author of La Madonne des Sleepings.

Bermann-Fischer Verlag. Little or no exile publishing has been done in the U.S. in the languages of the smaller countries overrun by Hitler, or by antiFascists in Italian. Anti-Franco Spanish books are almost entirely published in Mexico and South America.

But Harcourt, Brace has become the U.S. distributor for the untrammeled books in German of Bermann-Fischer Verlag, now mostly printed in Sweden, which reach the U.S. by devious and precarious routes. It was husky, sunburned Dr.

Gottfried Bermann-Fischer's firm in Germany which 40 years ago brought out Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and thereafter sold 1,300,000 copies. The doctor opposed the Nazis even after Hitler came to power, moved his business to Vienna, fled with his family to Switzerland, to Stockholm, finally to the U.S.

by way of Vladivostok. Besides the U.S., his market -- not very large -- comprises the German-speaking regions of Switzer land. Sweden and South America. His current list includes Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns) and Die vertauschten Koepje (The Transposed Heads) ; Franz Werfel's Der veruntreute Himmel (Embezzled Heaven} ; some verse and a fine line of anti-Nazi pamphlets.

Dr. Bermann-Fischer lives in Greenwich, Conn., where his 14-year-old daughter, eldest of three, recently won a gold watch at high school for excellence in French.

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