Two Strangers in Paris

THE UNDERGROUND CITY (755 pp.) -H. L. Humes -Random House ($4.95).

LES ADIEUX (244 pp.) -Franc,ois-Regis Basflde -Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

Ever since Paris was liberated, writers have felt the itch to put it back into a prison of their own special illusions. Of the latest, one is a bounding Basque named Franc,ois-Regis Bastide, a 32-year-old Frenchman who served under General Leclerc (whose column was the first to drive into Nazi-held Paris). Another is an American who has built a rambling bastille of words in which meanings are thrown into dungeons, to be reached only through endless labyrinths of painstaking prose.

H. L. (for Harold Louis) Humes Jr., 32, a founder of the little magazine Paris Review, has written a huge (755 pages) book which is the most indefatigable first novel of the year. Humes writes in a documentary, now-it-can-be-told style of a man who believes that he has the Government Printing Office at his tax-free disposal. Yet those who are prepared to do their own, rather than the novelist's job of winnowing a peck of wisdom out of a stockpile of fact will not be ill rewarded.

Hell's Pastures. His narrative is largely concerned with Major John Stone, an American who first came to Paris as holder of a scholarship in cello playing, played the organ briefly in a corrective school for girls, and, war being war, wound up an OSS operative in the French resistance. In a novel given to symbolism, his chosen code name tells much of the man and the book. It is "Dante" -the man who came back from Hell. Humes, no Virgil, conducts his Dante through the small hells of war, dishonor, and the loss of love. Hell, he suggests, is an endless business, but paradoxically, Humes makes it an interesting one, and suggests at the end that his readers are about to take up grazing rights in hell's burned pastures.

Stone is a key witness in the imaginary affaire Dujardin, which has for post-World War II France all the moral and political catnip of a Dreyfus case. Dujardin, a member of the French underground, is in jail, has been marked for death as one of the guilty who directed the massacre of a whole French village called Montpelle (which calls to mind France's nonfictional Oradour-Sur-Glane). To the French Left he becomes a martyr, and "Liberez Dujardin" is scrawled on every wall in Paris. Only the evidence of Stone, who is now symbolical of the dead (he is now with the United States Army Graves Registration), can prove that Dujardin is. in fact, no martyr but a traitor. This should make Stone a hero in his own right, but, as Humes tells it, he is caught between the upper millstone of a postwar U.S. right wing and the nether millstone of French Stalinism.

In this situation. Stone is crushed. Not so much by art, but by a stagehand's laborious job with the facts of recent history, Humes gives Stone's tragedy the air of inevitability. In the resistance. Stone had instinctively adopted the Churchillian position on the Communist alliance; he would use any stick to beat a dog. Thus he became a comrade of the Communist Alexi Carnot, a cynical, able opportunist, who when drunk demanded from Stone one thing -"trust." Stone was attracted to Carnot, just as he was repelled by the fanciful right-wing romanticism of "Berger," an American comrade in the resistance who wanted to put the Count of Paris back on the vacant throne of France and was fighting Stone's war "for God and the King." In the end, however, it is Communist Carnot's foreign god who betrays Humes's hero.

Poetry & Hatchets. In the face of his own knowledge that Dujardin was a turncoat and an accomplice of the massacre of Montpelle, Carnot withholds the testimony that would convict him. Although Dujardin later confesses his guilt, it is too late to save Stone, who becomes himself a martyr to forces he does not understand. He is left bereft of job. son and mistress, to pick up the threads of his life -symbolically, it is presumed -in the sewers of Paris.

What is intended as a parable of modern man's condition, facing a future as "irradiated brutes living in caves among the rubble," is spoiled by a mass of senseless documentation; e.g., no novelist, possibly not even the New York Times, should print the entire 3,000-word text of an ambassador's after-dinner speech. But basically, there is everything in The Underground City to make it an important novel except a little poetry and some scalpel work by about twelve editors.

Traumas in the Soul. Bastide's book belongs to the same order of events but to a very different order of literature. In a romantic, un-French way (Bastide is a self-conscious Basque who regards his Gallic countrymen as far too rigidly rational a breed), this beautifully written novel tells of traumas in the soul rather than lesions in the body politic.

His characters are as solid as only illusion can make them. The most important is Choralita Brichs, a Swedish girl full of spiritual despair living as a teacher in a Paris language institute whose slogan is "There Are No Foreigners." Novelist Bastide wistfully evokes a tender image of a lost girl trapped in a maze of incomprehension of the modern world. By extension, he seems to suggest through her that the French, notoriously inept or reluctant travelers, are also uneasy on home ground. Another character equally bizarre is an emigre Russian, Prince Alexis Vassilievitch Stellovski, living on illusions and too few francs a month. He gets his income as a translator specializing in news of the U.S.S.R., but his true life is in the lost past of Czarist Russia, of horses, serfs, ceremony and the drowned world of feudalism. His mania is to collect medals from Paris hock shops.

Delusion of Exile. It is a tribute to the quality of Bastide's writing, which comes through finely in translation, that from two such wisps he is able to evoke the living heart of Paris. His is not the grand or the obvious Paris of the boulevards or of politics that obsesses Humes: it is the Paris of cranks, little streets, odd churches, eccentric people. Bastide's ironic message seems to be: a disorder of the spirit, whether worldly, as in the case of the Russian, or religious, as in the case of the Swede, is equally damnable and pathetic. His theme is exile -external and internal -and those who are willing to follow a subtle course of sinuous prose will agree that he has justified his right to preface his book with the statement of the grand exile -Dostoevsky: "All that -all your foreign countries, your famous Europe -is only a delusion, and all of us, living in foreign countries, are only a delusion."

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