Awakening in Brittany

THE RIPENING SEED (186 pp.)--Co-leffe--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3).

The hothouse maturity of French teenagers has been a favorite theme of teenage French writers, e.g., Raymond Radiguet in Devil in the Flesh, francois Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse. In 1923, the late great Colette turned her fiftyish hand to the subject, produced a luminous and sensuously intuitive study of adolescent awakening. Republished in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter-century. The Ripening Seed has also taken scenario form as 1954's sensitively made but ineptly titled French film. The Game of Love. For the 16-and 15-year-old hero and heroine of this novel, love is about as far from a game as the coming-of-age rites of primitive tribes.

Dark-eyed Phil and blonde Vinca have been seaside pals on the Brittany coast through all their childhood summers. This summer some nameless tension clouds their carefree camaraderie. On their shrimping and crab-hunting forays, Phil turns broody, Vinca coquettishly skittish. Both erupt in inane little squabbles, shy away from the budding hints of their physical and psychological otherness. By the time they are ready to let the troubling word "love" cross their lips, they decide with childlike gravity that love is for grownups and that they are star-crossed by their years.

The youngsters' compact to wait for each other is a quick casualty to a kind of dea ex machina. a musky, thirtyish goddess in white named Mme. Dalleray who parks her car on the sea road and asks Phil for directions, then asks him to come over and see her some time at her neighboring villa. Phil does, and night after furtive night the two make hi-infidelity music together. Inwardly tormented. Phil confesses his faithlessness to Vinca, begging her with newborn masculine vanity not to commit suicide for love of him "either now or later." No death wisher, Vinca responds in a way that confirms Colette's renown as an astute psychologist of women in love.

The Ripening Seed is drenched in a pagan delight with the moods, sights and fecundities of nature. If the novel has a drawback, it stems from what might be called Colette's gland-directed theory of personality, a tendency to reduce all thought to desire, all spirit to sensation. But rarely has the self-contained world of adolescence burst its pod under the touch of so loving yet unsentimental and sharp-eyed a gardener.

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