The Love Game

FETE (248 pp.)--Roger Vailland--Knopf ($3.95).

"A woman," said Jean-Marc, "is never easy to have. One must be wily."

"It is the same as writing a book," said Duc. "One must be persistent and wily."

"Is it easy for you?"

"Neither with books nor with women. But at my age and because of the novels that I have written, the game follows a different pattern. They know that I know their wiles and they know mine. We waste less time."

This passage of dialogue--and indeed the whole novel--is an unwitting double parody of the love game (French) and the writing game (Hemingway). It is persistent but not nearly so wily as The Law (TIME, Oct. 6, 1958), Novelist Vailland's brilliantly sardonic parable of the lust for power and the power of lust acted out in a small Italian town. In this entirely serious effort, Vailland is a kind of French Hemingway, unintentionally imitating the master. The story Fete tells is a good deal less interesting than the story it gives away, the attitudes of the Hemingway vintage hero.

Rendezvous with Calendar. At 46,Due, a tiring veteran of the writing wars, is blocked on the plot of his latest novel. When the words will not come, he resorts to a form of inspiration that is not new in the writing game--although his name for it is: he goes on a brief, illicit sexual romp he calls a fete. His worldly-wise wife Leone ("I have made love with many men") indulges his impulses. When Lucie, who adores bop records and Duc's novels, arrives at the novelist's villa outside Paris, Due gets set for a fete. Since all French triangles are parallelograms, Lucie brings her husband Jean-Marc, a poet. The couples talk shop: How many past lovers and mistresses has each had, and how will the affair between Due and Lucie go off? It goes off in a burst of Sagantic frenzy in the last 20 pages of fete. "How arid," says the enraptured Lucie. No one is hurt. no one is moved, and Duc is soon back at the villa cleverly composing the first paragraph of his unblocked novel.

Duc's real rendezvous is with the calendar. He is interesting because he is dated in ways that link him with Hemingway's generation of writers--Malraux, Koestler and Vailland himself. The Hemingway hero is a romantic, but he prides himself on being a guardian of fact, a realistic reporter. Says Duc: "I try not to make things up." He thinks of life as a campaign in which he has won certain medals, all of which he insists on explaining. Duc has been decorated for being in and out of Communism (like Author Vailland), in the French underground, and on and off heroin. Women call for special citations. The Hemingway heroine derives from the spectral ladies of Poe. The sleeping bag is a kind of tomb. In a catatonic trance, Lucie does Duc's bidding. "Am I to undress? That's what I came for. Isn't that what you brought me for?"

Cult of Experience. Hemingway's generation was perhaps the last to find technology romantic. There is an entire subplot liaison between Duc and his Citroen. What with cars and guns, women and wars, the Hemingway hero is always counting his good times on his fingers and telling why they went bad. The great good time in 20th century fiction, and the origin of the fete idea, was the three-day fiesta of the running of the bulls at Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises. Fetes end, Due tells himself, when there is a fall from what sportsmen call "form," mystics call "grace" and gamblers call "luck." What actually happens is that intensity of sensation lacks duration. The Hemingway hero is a collector of great moments, but he refuses to acknowledge pauses or intermissions. He calls for madder music and redder wine, and if that fails, he pronounces that phase of his life dead. The activism of Hemingway's generation, politically and otherwise, and its habit of first embracing and then abandoning a person, a party or a cause, were attempts to keep the intensity of sensation at a constant peak. Duc prides himself on the fact that he never "stays put" and that "pursuit" is the prime quality of "the art of living."

Malraux finally recognized the limits of the cult of experience when he defined the writer's task as that of "converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought." With Hemingway himself, and disciples such as Vailland, the young man's quest has become the old man's folly of endlessly pursuing experience for the mere sake of experience.

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