French Thoreau

BLUE BOY--Jean Giono; translated by Katherine A. Clarke--Viking ($2.75).

Jean Giono has been called the French Thoreau. Giono's dusty Provenc,al towns and Alpine foothills are a long way from Walden Pond, but he writes with a Thoreau-like conviction that the only good life is the "natural" (non-city) life. And like Thoreau, who once spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, Giono went to jail rather than obey his government's mobilization order in September 1939.*

But Giono has little of Thoreau's warm passion for facts of nature, even less of his intellectual Puritanism. Born in 1895, at Manosque, Basses-Alpes, of French-Italian stock, Giono is essentially a nature-loving mystic. He is a teller of wry, earthy stories of the peasants in whom he professes to see the joy of the good life embodied. He has written about these people, sometimes bafflingly but always with zest and imagination, in The Song of the World, Harvest, and Joy of Man's Desiring.

His present book is an autobiographical fragment in the same vein. The Blue Boy of the title is Giono himself. His father runs a little cobbler shop. His mother operates a small home laundry. Through neighbors he learns to distinguish Bach from Mozart, Scarlatti from Rameau. A strange, dark visitor to his father's shop gives him Hesiod, Homer and the Bible to read.

In the late winter he goes up into the hills to live with Massot, the shepherd. "Madame Massot received me with clasped hands. . . . She was an agreeable country lady, very ugly; with so much goodness in her blind eye, so much goodness in her moustache, in her snuff-taking nose, in her sagging cheeks, in her black-lipped mouth, that she was frightfully ugly. It was an ugliness made of all that sacrifice, of all that martyrdom which constitutes real goodness."

With the Massots and with his parents, Jean begins to observe the Giono world. It is a world of good & evil, of working men and working women "all pressed, atom against atom, as in an enormous pomegranate." He learns about the baker's wife who ran off with a man. He sees a wheelwright trying to crucify his son.

Giono's world is a distorted, highly individual world, fascinating to the reluctant city-dweller, but real enough in terms of Giono's thesis that the "whole happiness of man" is in fields, hills and the "little valleys."

* Pacifist Giono was soon released from jail and allowed to go on with his writing. According to some, he became a collaborationist, a spokesman for Vichy and Petain. According to others he worked with the Underground. Many Frenchmen regard his politics as still suspect. Says he in Blue Boy (1932): "There is no glory in being French. There is only one glory: in being alive."

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