Frenchmen

MEN OF GOOD WILL: Volume One-- Jules Romains--Knopf ($2.50).

Romain Rolland wrote an epic about an individual (Jean Christophe); John Galsworthy wrote one about a family (The Forsyte Saga); but Jules Romains' magnum opus will seek comparison with an earlier, more comprehensive epic: La Comedie Humaine of Honore de Balzac. No mere tetralogy, its author himself does not say how many volumes will go to make up the whole. Its purpose: to give a true picture of Paris in the 20th Century. No individual, no family history could adequately cover so broad a scene. Says Author Romains: "What I see before my eyes is life in the 20th Century, our own life as modern men. I face the fact that this life of ours is very difficult to group around any central character. ... A century ago it may not have been absurd to make the whole life of a city like Paris gravitate around a single individual. . . . Today, in my belief, it would be rather ridiculous. I also face the fact that, in the world as I see it, families are not of very much importance."

Author Romains' method is reminiscent of John Dos Passos' (The 42nd, Parallel; 1919) and Aldous Huxley's (Point Counter Point), but he refuses to admit that they have influenced him: "I salute these experiments; I admire them on occasion. . . . But I salute them as younger comrades, and with some sense of priority." Though he has been actually working on Men of Good Will for only twelve years, he has been preparing for it since 1905. Of the 65-odd characters introduced in this first volume, few are related, many do not even meet. As each chapter carries along a little further their separate histories, parallel in time but irrelevant to each other, the reader might be forgiven for becoming confused. But Author Romains competently keeps the threads from tangling.

The story opens in Paris, October 6, 1908, early in the morning. Actress Germaine Baader is asleep in her bedroom. Schoolmaster Clanricard talks to his pupils about the threat of an European war. Apprentice Wazemmes grinds paint in a Montmartre workshop. Juliette Ezzelin leaves a book to be bound at Quinette's. Few minutes after she has left a murderer bursts into Quinette's shop, asks if he may wash his hands. Clanricard goes to lunch with his old master Sampeyre, Germaine Baader wakes up, Wazemmes goes to the races. Gurau, member of the Chamber of Deputies and Germaine's lover, has lunch with her and tells her about a speech he is going to make in the Chamber which will ruin the oil interests. Young Jean Jerphanion, on the train to Paris, dreams of his exciting future. Quinette meets the murderer by appointment, extracts a half-confession. Wazemmes is picked up by a fashionably dressed lady, who invites him to her apartment and treats him very nicely.

The corpse of the old woman whom the murderer has killed is discovered by the police. Wazemmes gets a new job and loses his virginity. Jerphanion enters the

Normal School and meets a new friend, Jallez. Gurau dines with Sammecaud, one of the oil barons, who tries to persuade him not to deliver his speech. Quinette finds out more & more about the murderer Leheudry. He gets himself so involved in Leheudry's affairs that finally murder is the only way out.

Thus abruptly Author Romains closes the first volume of his huge story. Though there is a general air of "to be continued." Romains' preface announces a warning: "I go so far even as to desire that . . . the reader should realize that certain things do not lead anywhere." He also warns the reader against trying to guess which of these characters will finally emerge as ''men of good will."

The Author, almost unknown in the U. S., has been for 20 years a French man of letters with a growing domestic reputation. Few such academic beginnings as his, as a scholar in classics, science and philosophy, have led to such far fields. But a consuming interest in his native land dragged him from his sedentary chair of philosophy to bicycle, foot and automobile trips all over France. Later he traveled in most of the countries of Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, North America. Going still further afield, he wrote plays (Le Trouhadec, Knock, Le Dictateur, Donogoo, Musse), poetry and novels; his trilogy (Lucienne, Le Dieu des Corps, Quand le Navire), under the title The Body's Rapture, was this year (TIME, Feb. 6) translated into English. Now, at 48, in what his followers and himself consider his full maturity, he is aiming furthest, highest yet: if his big book hits its mark he will be ranked with France's Marcel Proust, Norway's Sigrid Undset and Knut Hamsun, Germany's Thomas Mann.

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