Notable

VICTOR HUGO

by JOANNA RICHARDSON

334 pages. St. Martin's Press. $14.95.

At the age of 15 he wrote a poem that won the notice of the Academic Franc,aise. At the age of 83 he died, shortly after composing his last Alexandrine. During the decades between he came to think of himself as Olympic--an apt sobriquet, for Victor Hugo lived life with the vigor and ego of a Greek god. Once, when Hugo was about 80, his teen-age grandson found the old man making love to a young laundress. "Look," said Hugo proudly, "that is what they call genius."

Hugo spent a good deal of his genius in the prone position: he fathered a sizable family, kept an adoring mistress for half a century, and found time for countless other sexual adventures. Yet he had enough spare energy to become the 19th century's grand seigneur of French literature, hammering out poems, plays, novels and essays as other men might manufacture horseshoes.

Biographer Joanna Richardson, a British specialist in 19th century French authors, shows that it was politics more than literature that made Hugo a living myth. After Louis Napoleon Bonaparte betrayed the republic in his 1851 coup d' etat, the writer, originally a Bonaparte supporter, raged against the new emperor from exile. When Napoleon III finally fell in 1870, Olympic returned a hero.

Unfortunately, Richardson analyzes only one side of the complex Hugo--the bad side. Where two interpretations of the man's intentions are available, she chooses the unflattering. On the basis of one antagonistic witness, for instance, she argues that Hugo first turned on Louis Napoleon because he was not offered a suitable Cabinet post. In her discussion of Notre Dame de Paris, she observes how "[Hugo] presents the rabble with the gusto and the crudity of Breughel." Anyone who can turn Breughel into a pejorative cannot judge ordinary artists, much less Olympic.

ONE HELL OF AN ACTOR

by GARSON KANIN

276 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

Garson Kanin, 65, playwright, Hollywood and Broadway director, has a new credit. His latest novel consists of 27 years' worth of work-journal entries. The notes are on a fictive California stage actor named John J. Tumulty, dead ten years when the research starts in 1940. The diarist (coyly named Garson Kanin) tries to create a screenplay from the biographical data. But as Kanin turns and sifts his evidence, mysteries rise from "facts." Conflicting testimony comes from people who knew Tumulty (who bears a resemblance to John Barrymore), among them B.D. (Big Director), the actor's adopted son, who has none of the old man's natural talent for performing, and two men who do. It is the old women in the story who claim the greatest attention. They are tart and perceptive, with matching dialogue--not surprising from the man who wrote Born Yesterday and Adam's Rib. "You make me most uneasy," one of them remarks accurately at Kanin's snooping. "You seem detectivy, in a nasty way." Defeated by the complications he uncovers, the sleuth forsakes the project--as a screenplay.

He might have left it at that. This admixture of false names and real celebrity is ostensibly about theater in California and a young Hollywood. But it fills too many of its scenes with the kind of name dropping that belongs in columns, not pages. Kanin's central problem is the inability to take his own advice. "Remember," he writes, "that all the hot works are hot because of their characters." He should have concentrated on one of the elderly ladies. Kanin, as the main character, is lukewarm. So, by his own definition, is his novel.

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