Education of Luc Martin

THE COMPANY OF MEN (248 pp.)--Romain Gary--Simon & Schuster ($3 and $1).

"What's going to happen to me, if you are killed?" young Luc Martin asked his father, a fighter in the French Maquis. "You'll still have all the other men," his father, said.

But after the Liberation, orphaned 14-year-old Luc finds "the other men" an uneven lot. His first guardian turns out to be a professional hijacker. Then Luc becomes a ward of the nation, speedily finds that the nation is not much interested in what happens to the sons of heroes. From the cold cup of state charity Luc turns to the warmer brew of Black-Marketeer Vanderputte, a kindly Fagin who harbors a nest of adolescent thieves as runners for his goods.

In their spare time, Luc's fellow teenagers introduce him to a dream world in which the models are Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. (Fourteen-year-old Josette practices screaming into the wind until her voice approximates the right cracked huskiness; Luc tries to imitate Gunman Bogart.) Off & on, Luc sits in on an interminable argument between Black-Marketeer Vanderputte and a friend on the police force who comes to visit him every week. Vanderputte stands up for the dignity of man and humanitarian optimism; the police official, Kuhl, stands up for Communism and the need for iron discipline. Vanderputte turns out to have been a traitor who betrayed a whole Resistance group to the Germans; Kuhl is blackmailing him while waiting the ideal moment to denounce him.

Luc finally decides that there is only one clear way into "the company of men," i.e., by becoming as merciless, as cruel and as cowardly as men all seem to be. At the end of a long police chase, in which he has sought in vain for a single person capable of a disinterested act of charity, he shoots Vanderputte--the only human being who has done him a kindness since his father's death.

What makes Novelist Romain Gary's pessimism significant is that it is not just the outpouring of a maladjusted highbrow. Gary is no Sartre watching life as a spectator. A French career diplomat now stationed in Bern, Switzerland, he has behind him a solid record as a fighter pilot in the French Air Force, which he joined in 1938. His novel, written in 1947-48, shows the extent to which many in Europe had lost heart, and lost their grip on the beliefs that made Europe great, in the fifth decade of the 20th Century.

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