Books: Mixed Fiction, Nov. 5, 1956

THE INSURGENTS, by Vercors (308 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95). The hero of this odd novel is a weird doctor-poet who puts himself in a state of suspended animation for the good of humanity, or so he thinks. Fiftyish and French but drenched in decadent German romanticism, Egmont no longer practices medicine or writes poetry, but takes drugs and drifts through rooms replete with twisted vines, oddly shaped chemical phials and stuffed animals. As he confides to a friend: “I wouldn’t be so bored if someone explained to me what it was all about, here on this planet.”

Egmont is snapped out of his boredom by a foot injury that begins to gangrene just when he comes across some books on yoga. Egmont decides to find out if death and disease can be vanquished by a conscious act of will. All that is needed, he feels, is to sink into one’s “cellular consciousness” in order to control the action of body tissues. With his bosomy mistress Olga at his side, he enters a “semi-cataleptic” trance and “goes away” into his leg, clearing up the gangrene as the amazed Olga watches. Egmont is soon keen “to forget all knowledge, live my organic life, flourish like a vegetable.” But when Egmont is well on his way to becoming an amoeba, Olga gets panicky, has him insulin-and electro-shocked back to everyday life. Egmont rather sheepishly admits that maybe man had better develop the mind he has rather than try to lose it in matter. The author’s further notion that mental progress is some kind of communal process is underlined by a lengthy subplot about a company strike that contains all the solidarity-forever, to-the-barricades cliches of the ’30s.

Unhappily, Vercors metaphysical skin-diving never gets much below the level of a mad-scientist movie in this odd tale of a man seeking “the refuge of non-being.”

THE WHOLE VOYALD, by William Saroyan (243 pp.; Atlantic Little, Brown; $3.75), a book of autobiographical sketches and short stories, begins with a confession from one of the least reticent of men. “Before my first book was published I was not a drinker,” declares Saroyan, “but the following nine years, until I was drafted into the Army, I drank as much as I liked, and I frequently drank steadily for nine or ten hours at a time … I believe I have learned a lot while I have been drinking with friends, just as most of us may say we have learned a lot in sleep. There is, however, a recognizable limit to what may be learned by means of drinking.” Furthermore, he adds, “I squandered a great deal of money that I earned as a writer and I lost a lot of it gambling.” As a result, “I am head over heels in debt. I expect to get out of debt by writing or not at all. I have no savings account, no stocks, or bonds, no real estate, no insurance, no cash … I simply have got to hustle for a living.”

Despite this disarmingly candid appeal, readers should be warned not to rush to the flamboyant Armenian’s fiscal relief unless they are incurable addicts of the wacky, the whimsical and the whopperish. Only in Saroyan, perhaps, could one meet the vice president of a cemetery company who yearns to write ad copy like “Inter here. A lot for your money.” Or the off-key executive who plays Cupid by posting a lonely young man in an empty cubbyhole in the piano warehouse with no duties except to wait for the right girl to come along. She does. Saroyan alternates his fictional eccentrics with spiked nonfictional vignettes presumably drawn from his own true life, e.g., Saroyan as Tom Sawyer wriggling his canny way past movie ushers for free, Saroyan as a struggling “unproven” artist peddling vegetables during the Depression, Saroyan as a proven artist holding a copy of his first book (“I was so excited I couldn’t roll a Bull Durham cigarette”). “”Voyald,” pontificates Saroyan to all who might be mystified by this title, “is a way of saying ‘Void. Voyage and World.’ “