A Balzac for the Beasts?

THE NEW NOAH'S ARK -- Andre Demaison -- Macmillan ($2.50).

When Andre Demaison treats of human beings, he is merely a cultivated, steel-hard French Colonial businessman who seems to be unable to write badly. When he describes a primeval, half-witted stowaway he begins to warm up. When he writes of beasts and birds and reptiles, he is a blend of scientist, sensualist and mystic, but above all he is an exact and subtle artist, at ease in a world entirely his own. Demaison plans a series of volumes -- for which his over-all title is La Comedie Animale -- to do for the animal world what Balzac tried to do for the human. He stands a very fair chance of succeeding.

The New Noah's Ark is Demaison's account of a voyage he made when he was only 23. He was in command of the small Jouet des Plots, stitching along the west coast of Africa; his business was to buy up wild animals for the circuses, zoos, rich amateurs of Europe. He acquired, among other beasts, a panther, a magnificent, tame, young lion, a buffalo, a young elephant, a hyena, a dwarf hippopotamus, two little sacred pythons whose delight was to weave themselves upon his ankles. The buffalo broke loose in the hold, one of the chimpanzees piteously died. Ashore Demaison ran into snake-sorcerers, a terrific flogging scene, a yellow fever epidemic. Demaison gives such incidents their due; but he makes his less eventful passages even better:

"But as the breeze did not drop, and for the first time on our voyage we experienced the effect of pitching and rolling combined, a great silence fell upon the ship. . . . The little Niger hippopotamus ... lay down with his head flat on the deck, and ceased to think. His great red eyes looked through me at I know not what. The fawn, the antelopes, and the river-hogs swayed on their cloven, pointed hooves as they tried to maintain their balance. No pride in their eyes now. . . . The buffalo was.swaying in his crate, with a wandering look in his eye and ears laid back, like a mute trying to make a speech. . . . The hyena dribbled, ate, vomited, and ate again; no sickness, still less any discomfort could diminish his voracity. The panther lay huddled in a corner of her cage, with staring fur and a look of mystery in her eyes. . . . Can the sufferings of animals reveal what is going on in their dim souls?"

Night after night, throughout the voyage, a comet increased upon the sky. Without insistence or even comment Demaison invests this comet and, at length, the whole of his narrative, with a strange symbolic radiance. At the end, the comet masked by storm, the ship helmed by a halfwit, he is wrecked. When he comes to, he, the halfwit, a dog, a cat, sit on the sand and gaze into the gashed hull. The beach is one intricate fabric of escaping footprints. The most valuable of the animals were insured; he is glad of their liberty. Into the sack that once carried his loving serpents he has scooped the black sand, richly loaded with titanium. It will be tested in Europe. Negresses will use it to straighten their hair.

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