Exiles Waiting

PARIS GAZETTE--Lion Feuchfwanger--Viking ($3).

Paris Gazette is an 860-page story of German emigres and Nazis in Paris in 1935. Through exhaustive attention to two families and a newspaper, and an apt use of minor characters, Lion Feuchtwanger has set down an unprecedented amount on what it means to be of either camp.

In the spring of that year Sepp Trautwein is still just a warm-tempered Munich bourgeois living in voluntary exile: unappreciative of his excellent wife, writing a piece now & then for the exiles' paper, the Paris Gazette, working hard and slowly at his gifted, rather frigid music.

But when the journalist Friedrich Benjamin is kidnapped into Germany and Sepp is called to work at his desk, he uncorks a talent for satire so useful that uneasily he neglects his music for it.

Thanks considerably to Sepp's print-lashings, Nazis-about-town become annoyed with the Gazette, hatch a scheme to buy over its angel. When Sepp is fired, the whole staff walks out after him, starts a rival paper. Sepp, frantic by now to get back to his music, is caught again.

Other things happen to Sepp. He has argued now & again with his intelligent, stodgy, Communist son; by his neglect he has brought his wife to suicide. Without at all realizing how, he has brought himself free of the reverential, abstract chilliness which inhibited his music. At book's end he sits hearing (over the radio), the first performance of the first great music he has written, the Waiting-Room Symphony.

Paris Gazette tells of many others besides the Trautweins: of Wiesener, a man of talent sold out to the Nazis, who salves what conscience he has in writing a brilliant, corrupt biography of Beaumarchais, and a secret journal; of Raoul his son, a bright, sensitive young crook, who tries leading a French-fascist Youth Movement, writes a scalding novel about his father; of Elli, a "helpless" and much-helped refugee who, flufily shouldering her betters out of the way, manages to make out very nicely.

During one of their talks Sepp tells his son: "The old world isn't dead yet and the new world isn't born yet, and this is a horrible age of transition; it's really nothing but a horrible waiting-room. I've put it all into my music. . . ."

Though he falls short of Sepp's symphony in inspiration, Feuchtwanger has crowded an excellent plenty of that suspended world into his book.

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