Caveman Modern

FRENCH GIRLS ARE VICIOUS (177 pp.)--James T. Farrell--Vanguard ($3.50).

In the socially conscious '30s, when rage was all the rage, James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan seemed the sort of protest against a poor slum kid's lot that dumb, brutish Studs himself might have written if he could write. But the U.S. stopped singing the hard-time blues, and time moved on, forgetting to leave James T. Farrell a forwarding address. French Girls Are Vicious, a book of short stories, is mainly steamed up about sex, or the lack of it, and might be subtitled "the pursuit of unhappiness."

In the title tale, a lonely but bossy U.S. Government girl stationed in Paris sinks her fingernails into a handsome French boy, but only deep enough for him to run to the nearest French girl to dress his wounds. In A Dream of Love, a big bosomy tourist named Florence and a seedy expatriate named Tony sidle up to each other in a Paris cafe. Says Tony: "You are just like the woman I've always dreamed of. If you had lived in Venice five centuries ago, your thighs would be immortal." After one night with Tony, Florence wonders if she is just plain immoral and takes the first boat to the U.S.

Two of the stories are mentally furnished in something better than Farrell's caveman modern. Kilroy Was Here is an evocative, semi-autobiographical prowl among the littered streets and crumbling tenements of Farrell's boyhood on Chicago's South Side. Tart as melting aspirin on the tongue, it lives up to its tag line, "Kilroy was here but left because the place stank." A Baptism in Italy takes a tender look at a beat-up Italian writer-revolutionary who is punchdrunk from too many rounds in a concentration camp. He rouses himself to play gracious host to a sympathetic pair of visiting Americans, and is bitterly hurt to find that they regard him just as an interesting sidetrip. These two stories suggest what Farrell, now 51, could do if he were not so busy regarding the good life as an illusion and good English as an affectation.

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