Mixed Fiction

A NOBLE PROFESSION, by Pierre Boulle (255 pp.; Vanguard; $3.95), proves once again that French Novelist Boulle owes his fictional allegiance to a one-track mmcl--his own. His only weapon is irony; his heroes seem forever doomed to self-deceit, to rationalizing their weaknesses until they seem like virtues. In The Bridge over the River Kivai, a Colonel Blimp hurt his own, his men's and his nation's cause by raising boneheadedness to the level of character. In Face of a Hero, a lawyer transformed personal cowardice into a basis for public esteem. In the present book, a Free French intelligence agent turns traitor and yet convinces himself that he has won a personal badge of courage.

Author Boulle served as a Free French agent himself during World War II and spent two years in a Vichy prison after he mistook an enemy for a De Gaulle man. So Boulle knows the background of his latest non-hero, Lieut. Cousin, an intellectual, successful novelist and critic, who has delusions of heroism even as his unit is put to rout by the Germans. Running away, he still sees himself stemming the retreat, and when he reaches England in a small boat, he has no trouble seeing himself as an intelligence man who can confound the enemy. His boss, a psychiatrist in civilian life, gives him his chance.

But Cousin fails, and at the first threat of torture, he sells out to the Germans. He also kills his accomplice, who survived torture but had the bad luck to witness Cousin's cowardice. Working for the enemy. Cousin can still surround himself with the illusion of righteousness. His now deranged mind pretends that his cowardice was really a means of making himself more useful to France. He ranges from total fear to fantastic visions of capturing Hitler through brilliant trickery. The Germans bully him, despise him, and drive him relentlessly toward deeper betrayals.

The trouble is that Cousin is really too easy a mark for Author Boulle. Like many a modern novelist, he has made the mistake of trying to tell a story while at the same time unraveling a psychological case history. The story is interesting and suspenseful enough. But the psychological explanation of Agent Cousin's case, as offered by the psychiatrist, is altogether too glib: "An intellectual ... I summed him up correctly."

THE GRAPES OF PARADISE, by H. E. Bates (239 pp.; Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.75), recalls the fact that a good storyteller will draw a face that at first seems dull, then beguile his readers with the history of its lines. Author Bates (The Darling Buds of May) draws such faces in this collection of four novellas, but then spins stories that merely confirm the first impression. It is a little hard to tell why --the prose is reeled off smoothly enough, the characters are credible and their involvements follow sound, conservative lines.

The title novella is a routine tale of Papeete, the sort of thing that had considerable power in the hands of its originator, but which in the present imitation is just one more slice of Maugham's apple pie. The narrator sees a man with a livid knife scar and eyes "savage . . . with blind melancholy" standing in a downpour of rain, oblivious to his surroundings. Of course the derelict tells his story, and of course it involves a trip to the South Seas to cure troubled nerves, the narcosis of the islands (two weeks is too much and a year is not enough), a futile affair with a native girl, a shark, a haunted soul. As Bates writes it, this is the sort of romance that women's-magazine editors commission to lure the husband vote.

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