The Gang's All Here

THE WIND IS RISING--Jules Romains--Knopf ($3).

Last fall in Mexico City, his place of exile, Jules Romains wrote finis to Men of Good Will, his column-of-elephants novel of French life between 1908 and 1933. In addition to breaking the century's longdistance fiction record, Men of Good Will has taken almost 15 years to write and required three indexes for a cast of 400 characters, ranging from scrubwomen to Cabinet Ministers.

Many U.S. critics have hailed Author Remains' jumbo panorama with awe. Wrote Critic Clifton Fadiman who has been awed all along: "When the little ones ask, 'Grandfather, what did you do before the revolution?' perhaps the only answer many of us will be able to make will be, 'I was a contemporary of Jules Romains.' "

For such admirers, the appearance of The Wind Is Rising, the twelfth volume in Author Romains' series,* is an event.

Even less faithful readers, whose wrinkles have kept pace, year by year, with those of Author Remains' characters, are likely to regard the closing volumes of the opus with the kind of intimate regret they feel for their own receding hairlines. But late-arrival readers who stroll in on the latest 559 pages will find that, though they may miss the average novel's cosy intimacy, they can easily learn to enjoy a cast of characters whose past is already in the public library.

The Bad Omens. The world of The Wind Is Rising is France in 1927 and 1928. Author Remains focuses on it like a man with two cameras--one for overall pan shots, the other for intimate closeups. After laying out the racy boulevards and teeming suburbs of Paris (as seen by a financier in a hovering plane), Author Remains dives down to the corner of a little tearoom for a close-up of a plump Parisian mother fretting over her daughter's newly modish knee-high skirt.

But, as in all the volumes of Men of Good Will, earth and heaven, ideals and reality, are tied together by the thoughts and struggles of a few major characters whose aim in life is to better the world. And in The Wind Is Rising, for the first time, the youthful idealism of Author Romains' men of good will is beginning to shiver in the cold draft of political affairs. As they enter middle age, they begin dimly to see bad omens. Chief among these omens is what Author Remains calls "the rise of gangs and the gang spirit."

Author Remains' young Parisians are sick to death of old-fashioned morals and politics; they are desperately bored with "the vice of talking endlessly about principles and programs and rules of membership." Their new slogan is "Action First." It doesn't much matter what is done so long as one is able to "do something."

The men who sense this popular state of mind, and pounce on it, are the little French Hitlers. Like Hitler, they draw followers from all classes: disillusioned Communists, bored bourgeoisie, students.

The Cohesive Emotion. Intellectual Gangster Gilbert Nodiard believes that a well-run gang should have neither program nor ideas. But he is convinced that it must have some kind of "warm and moist emotion of complete complicity" to hold it together. The new German group, the Nazis, he reflects enviously, are bound by the moist emotion of homosexuality--which would never work in France, because French homosexuals are "not a very virile type."

Gangster Nodiard finds the answer to his dreams at a party of young Mayfair married couples. These British bright-young-things meet weekly for elaborate orgies of free love. After attending one of these, Nodiard scuttles back to Paris to initiate his gang. The British see their orgies as strictly nonpolitical pleasures. But to the Nodiard gang "our love meetings will be our Holy of Holies. . . ."

Some readers may feel that in his pornodramatic foreshadowing of the Nazi brew, Author Remains is being wise after the event. But most readers are likely to be impressed by the deftness with which he goes from door to door in the Paris streets of 1928, uncovering the first faint stirrings of that perverted violence which, a decade later, joined its Nazi counterpart to trample France into the mud.

*The final two (tentative titles: The Magic Carpet and The Seventh of October) have been translated, will probably be published in the U.S. in 1946-47.

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