Books: A Child’s Garden of Venery

The kind of impassioned prattle that made Franchise Sagan a sensation at 18 and a bestselling bore at 22 continues to infect young girl writers. Two current examples of vernal volubility, each the work of a 14-year-old:

BEAU CLOWN, by Berthe Grimault (188 pp.; Rinehart; $3), a crawling compost heap of a novel, accepts as normal and comical the sort of horror about which seamy-side Novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote with fascination. Author Grimault describes a degenerate clan of French peasants and the flotsam that fetches up at their farm—two prostitutes, four U.S. Negro soldiers foraging for sex, and a netful of AWOL lunatics, including a gently demented old clown and a bloody-nailed slug named Chopper (he is obsessed with decapitation). When Chopper is gored by a huge white bull, a litter of bare-bottomed children worry his body like jackal pups, then lose interest while a pig nuzzles the corpse. The narrator, a young farm girl, tumbles through her tale with savage glee, takes a sorrowful tone only when relating that, although old enough (14), she is not big enough (4 ft. 3 in.) to attract the soldiers’ interest.

Tiny (4 ft. 8 in.) Author Grimault, herself a French farm girl, groups her rush of words well in short, clear sentences. Despite the repulsive midden from her imagination, there is a kind of dirty-faced innocence about the book, and an undeniable storytelling ability. Half-illiterate when she wrote the novel, Berthe Grimault had help from a village postmaster who barbered the grammar, laundered the sex. Currently, a proper laundering is in process: at the Grove, a British finishing school, the staff is trying to get Berthe to behave as if she were less familiar with country matters.

STRANGE EVIL, by Jane Gaskell (256 pp.; Dutton; $3.50), is a saner but less fascinating novel. It reads a little as if Alice had blundered into the court of Pierre Louÿs instead of the Red Queen. The book abounds in bare-breasted courtesans and tall, flashing-eyed men, many of them wicked. Most of the action, described in lavender prose, takes place in fairyland, which is reached by springing lightly off Notre Dame de Paris. The heroine, for reasons probably most obvious to a 14-year-old girl bent on writing a naughty novel, is a nude model. Nevertheless, she remains pure to the end in spite of the blandishments of satyrs and other fairyland charmers: “His eyes were like whirls of black gas. Her knees sank. Her stomach melted. His hand was held out toward her.”

Well-brought-up Author Gaskell sees her fairyland through a kaleidoscope made of prunes and prisms; she might profit if she could spend a semester as an exchange student in Berthe Grimault’s barnyard.

The virus has spread even to Russia. Stern Soviet critics, who have excoriated Franchise Sagan for her preoccupation with what they call “active love,” have just discovered an activist in their midst: youthful (exact age unknown) Latvian Writer Dagnija Cielava. In a Latvian magazine, Karogs (The Banner), hot-penned Author Cielava published a long short story about a glad-glanded young roundheel named Margita. daughter of a Stalin Prizewinner, who confounds Russian puritanism by passing out her favors like agitprop pamphlets, tweaks the Soviets’ sense of caste by giving most of the prizes to her father’s chauffeur. Sniffed one critic: “There is not a single concrete line of dialogue. All we find is the gossip of coffeehouses, the vague talk of teenagers, the smart flirtation thought to portray the gallant life of students. However, Cielava’s portrayal makes this life transparent, like the dress of an old chanteuse on the stage of a bourgeois nightclub.”

There is little likelihood that Cielava is bourgeois enough to try to become the Volga’s Left Bank banner waver. An authoress so activistic might find herself writing a Bonjour, Siberia.