Books: All for Love

THE COLORS OF THE DAY (310 pp.)—Romaln Gary—Simon & Schuster($3.50.)

The French expression for love at first sight is un coup de foudre—a crash of thunder. When Jacques Rainier meets Ann Garantier at a carnival in Nice, the crash is shattering. Rainier is a one-armed French intellectual with a two-fisted attitude toward love and war. For 15 years—in Spain, the French air force, the R.A.F., the Maquis—he has been fighting “to defend a civilization which, from the Virgin Mary, Dante, Petrarch and the Troubadors…to the humblest of our movies…has always celebrated the cult of love.” Ann is a Hollywood movie star who seems frigid only because the right man has never come along to thaw her out. The emotional storm they generate is so electric that for two days they barely have time to eat.

In The Colors of the Day, French Novelist Remain Gary has written a rhapsody to love that is both lyrical and brilliantly orchestrated. At times, Author Gary allows his brilliance to run away with his common sense, and in overstating his case he undercuts it. But, for all that, he has a way with words, and he tells a long story with enough immediacy and warmth to recall the salad days to an octogenarian.

Man’s Oldest Profession. Ann quickly learns that Rainier, an incorrigible idealist, is about to ship for Korea to fight Communism, and that she has a redoubtable rival: “l’humanité…the last femme fatale.” For though her lover bursts with poetic talk about keeping her happy, he is committed to “man’s oldest profession, which is to be forever reaching for some distant goal of Justice and Liberty.”

In short, as Author Gary acknowledges by quoting it, his hero is afflicted with the old Cavalier conviction: “I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honor more.” Explicitly, his duty is to keep making the world safe for the kind of love he lives for. Rainier rails at some of the practical aspects of such duties. “Oh you statesmen of bad breath!” he declaims. “How dare you spend hours in your councils listening to anything that is not a sound of a lover’s kiss?”

Amorous Defense. Author Gary does not waste much sympathy on Ann’s husband, Willie Bauché, who is having hives, hay fever and asthma at the thought of having lost her to Rainier. Willie is a Hollywood “universal genius” and triple-decker phony, not quite real enough to be Apathetic. Willie finally hires a killer to get rid of Rainier. But the killer is killed himself, and Rainier goes to Korea, leaving Ann desolate but able to understand a bit of the old Cavalier compulsion.

Novelist Gary, who is also a professional French diplomat at the United Nations, has succeeded fairly well in portraying that complicated rarity, the intellectual cavalier. Also, no doubt of it, he has turned out one of the most amorous defenses of democracy in a long time.