Between Holocaust And Hollywood

By Melvin Maddocks

SHADOWS IN PARADISE

by ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

translated by RALPH MANHEIM

305 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95.

When Erich Maria Remarque died a year and a half ago at the age of 72, one thought of old films rather than old books. Lush Dmitri Tiomkin sound tracks seemed to leap from the obituaries to strike Remarque's patented theme: grand passion, grand despair in wartime. In one's stereophonic memory chambers, violins throbbed counterpoint to far-off guns and the crumpled-velvet whispers of thwarted lovers. It is as if Remarque's art were defined by one of those overstylized love scenes in Arch of Triumph between Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman--two old pros struggling to come through with tears and accents after all those years in Hollywood.

Married to Movie Star Paulette Goddard, living in a stage-set estate on the shores of Lake Maggiore, turning out fiction that self-converted from the pages of women's magazines into box office scenarios, Remarque appeared to be a kind of cinematic fantasy himself. He was at least as handsome as his own leading men. For a time he had been a racing driver of sorts. He collected Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir and Degas. What more could a reader ask of a novelist? But behind the celebrity-author lay a more substantial personality.

Remarque was the last of the Lost Generation. Wounded five times as a teen-age German soldier in World War I, he could have played himself in All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from his first novel, which in Germany alone sold 1.2 million copies in 1929. Remarque came to deploy war like a painted backdrop. But his final novel (ten novels later) indicates that he changed less than his readers from his original pacifism-- that war remained his obsessive tormentor, his in explicable agony to the end.

On its lacquered surface, Shadows in Paradise shows all the familiar Remarque gloss. There is the typically commercial title, second only to Heaven Has No Favorites. There is the often wordy dialogue-- pretentiously sophisticated, as if spoken by an impostor duke. There is the slightly too chic setting: in this case, places like El Morocco, the fashion-and-art sa lons of New York and the swimming pools of Hollywood in 1944.

A young German wearing the new name of Robert Ross has just arrived in America, the victim of both French and German concentration camps. He is, as Remarque must put it, "an Orestes pursued by the distant cries of the Furies." How will this creature of survival be restored to the human race? Remarque knows but one way. He produces his interchangeable Remarque woman, in this instance an exotic model named Natasha, half Anna Karenina, half Playmate of the Month. Between love bouts, Robert circulates among other refugees, including a Jewish actor who makes a successful career out of playing storm troopers in the movies. He also operates as assistant to a rascally art dealer named Silvers, who flatters his rapacious clients by calling them "collectors," and like Remarque, specializes in French Impressionists.

As usual, love `a la Remarque al most but not quite works, trailing away into a gentle melancholy, a secondary sort of exile and loss. And those sub plots--amusing, a bit cynical, dotted with European jokes about America--constitute the best parts. By their very gaucherie they suggest appealingly the embarrassment of an author trying to bridge modern experience, from the sheer horror of war to the sheer banality of peace.

Remarque's curious polarization between holocaust and Hollywood may reflect less calculation than nasty skeptics have supposed. In retrospect, his tales seem the defense mechanisms of a romantic trapped in a bad time. Remarque needed illusions as large, as desperate, as his master disillusion with World War I. But he was not alone. So, for better and for worse, did his readers.

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