Mixed Fiction

FELLOW PASSENGER, by Geoffrey Household (271 pp.; Atlantic--Little, Brown; $3.50).

This is another dance around the atom bomb, but unlike Authors Snow and Bourjaily (see above), Novelist Household has left aside the moral self-torture and told a rattling good story. The ancient English manor house of Moreton Intrinseca has become a hostel for scientists working on The Bomb. But in Ecuador, his dying father has told Claudio Howard-Wolferstan that "certain assets" are hidden up an old attic chimney in the ancestral mansion. Barred from lawful entry by ultra-strict security rules, Clubman Claudio climbs the wall one night, vainly searches an attic chimney and falls first into the arms of an amorous lady metallurgist and then of a famous nuclear physicist. If this be treason, Author Household (Rogue Male) has made the entertaining most of it. He is a master of a category of fiction that has yet to be named, although it has already become a Household item--the special mixture of whodunit, romantic adventure and politics.

After his chimney-climbing bit, Claudio gives the beaks the slip, falls in with the Communist underground, escapes from a Soviet vessel bearing him as a hero to Moscow, cycles up and down London as a chimney sweep. Along the way he also becomes, by hilarious turns, cricketer, abstract painter, elephant trainer and guitar-strumming Sikh, manages to land in his metallurgist's bed and in the Tower of London. Whether or not he also gets the treasure keeps the reader in a fine swivet of suspense. Alec Guinness should have a field day playing this one.

THE VAGABOND, by Coletfe (223 pp.; Farrar, Sfraus & Young; $3). When French Novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was a pretty young girl at the turn of the century, her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, better known as Willy, was openly and persistently unfaithful to her. One day she came home to find him with still another woman. "With an ease that only habit can give," she later wrote, "I stopped a moment and whispered in Monsieur Willy's ear, 'Hurry, malheureux, hurry! The next one has been waiting outside for a quarter of an hour!' " Willy's infidelities led Colette to divorce, to a career as a vaudeville dancer and to a book. The Vagabond (written in 1910 but published in the U.S. for the first time this week) is one of her more resolutely" autobiographical novels. The heroine is a gifted writer who has suffered a disastrous marriage and is now dancing for her dinner in a Montmartre music hall frequented by pimps and whores. Renee bares her body ("impeccable"), her soul (badly scarred) and her claws (sharply feline). One night a rich timber prince barges into her dressing room and breathlessly announces his admiration. Renee wonders why she shrinks from him, and realizes "it is because . . . this fellow is a man." Loving and losing a man has taught her to hate men, but she falls in love all over again. In the end, Renee gives up her lover, and her exit line is a sigh: "Ah. how long shall I not thirst for you upon my road!"

The Vagabond offers the truest portrait ever made of the tangy milieu of French vaudeville, along with the confessions of a complex and captivating woman who hated men but could not resist them.

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