How to Stop Being a Vagabond

EXILE by Peter Weiss. 245 pages. Delacorfe. $5.95.

Peter Weiss, author of Marat/ Sade and The Investigation, is best known as one of the more strident practitioners of the theater of fact. Therefore it should come as no surprise that this novel contains little fancy; it is frankly and almost completely autobiographical. Like his plays, Exile is a characteristically raw and intensely passionate statement. Weiss's first-person hero is a German-born half Jew who at 18 leaves his country to get away from the Nazis. He subsequently sojourns in England, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Sweden (where Weiss now lives). But the title refers not so much to the transient state of a political refugee as it does to the traditional alienated state of an artistic spirit.

For Weiss first paints himself as a dreamy artist in a Germanic society of burghers. His Jewish-born father is a plodding textile-mill owner; his mother is a driving Hausfrau--a stern and pious character preaching joylessly that "Life means working, working, and then more working." Young Peter flees the expected middle-class role by becoming an art student in Prague.

The first section of the novel, dealing with Weiss's most formative years, is rendered in a mist of Proustian reverie set off by the death of his father. Incidents of incestuous exploration with his sister, her sudden death, his adolescent impotence, his art student's vie-not-so-Boheme, are all presented with a quiet but quivering honesty.

The second and final section, covering 1940-1947, seems to lack the revelatory authority of Weiss's earlier disorders and sorrows. Now in Sweden, he is no longer an innocent freshman questing, but rather a jaded graduate detouring. He revolves in typical refugee circles, begins to bed down casually, regards paternity indifferently, soon marries carelessly. Although still a painter, he has also started to dabble at writing --in Swedish--but he has yet to commit himself fully either to art or to his own life.

Only in the novel's apocalyptic last scene, in which he finds his artistic torch, does Author Weiss seem to recapture a literary fire. His hero's marriage is a failure, his two-year-old daughter has been deposited with his mother. His long way's journey toward his own identity leads him to Paris. And there one day, sitting in a wicker chair in a Left Bank cafe, he suddenly realizes that he can escape his perennial sense of personal and artistic vagabondage. By accepting the German language, "the language I had learned at the beginning of my life, the natural language that was my tool, that now belonged to me alone and had nothing more to do with the land where I had grown up ... I could live in Paris or in Stockholm, in London or New York . . . That evening, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country."

On this note of romantic triumph, Weiss, who is now 51, ends his self-portrait of the artist as a doddering young man of 30. But in his exultant rush to achieve the best possible world for his cosmopolitan self, he does not so much offer a rational resolution of his schizophrenic problems as a lyrical denial of them. Indeed, it is the very real and conflicting specifics in his past, arising out of his being at once German and Jewish, at once criminal and victim, that give his work its distinctive shape and validity--not his own vague if universal artistic longings.

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